Topic: Biography (Page 2)

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πŸ”— Indian entrepreneur, industrialist, and philanthropist, Ratan Tata, dead at 86

πŸ”— Biography πŸ”— Business πŸ”— New York (state) πŸ”— India πŸ”— New York (state)/Cornell University πŸ”— Zoroastrianism πŸ”— India/Mumbai πŸ”— India/Maharashtra

Ratan Tata (28 December 1937 – 9 October 2024) was an Indian industrialist and philanthropist who served as chairman of Tata Group and Tata Sons from 1990 to 2012, and then as interim chairman from October 2016 through February 2017. In 2008, he received the Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian honour in India. Ratan had previously received the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian honour, in 2000. He passed away on October 9, 2024, following a prolonged illness related to his age.

Ratan Tata was the son of Naval Tata, who was adopted by Ratanji Tata. Ratanji Tata was the son of Jamshedji Tata, the founder of the Tata Group. He graduated from the Cornell University College of Architecture with a bachelor's degree in architecture. He joined Tata in 1961, where he worked on the shop floor of Tata Steel. He later succeeded J. R. D. Tata as chairman of Tata Sons upon the latter's retirement in 1991. During his tenure, the Tata Group acquired Tetley, Jaguar Land Rover, and Corus, in an attempt to turn Tata from a largely India-centric group into a global business. Tata was also a philanthropist.

Tata was a prolific investor and invested in over 30 start-ups, most in a personal capacity and some via his investment company.

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πŸ”— Alan Turing's 100th Birthday - Mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, scientist

πŸ”— Biography πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Mathematics πŸ”— London πŸ”— Philosophy πŸ”— Philosophy/Logic πŸ”— England πŸ”— Biography/science and academia πŸ”— Philosophy/Philosophy of science πŸ”— History of Science πŸ”— Computing/Computer science πŸ”— Robotics πŸ”— Philosophy/Philosophers πŸ”— Cryptography πŸ”— LGBT studies/LGBT Person πŸ”— LGBT studies πŸ”— Athletics πŸ”— Greater Manchester πŸ”— Cheshire πŸ”— Cryptography/Computer science πŸ”— Philosophy/Philosophy of mind πŸ”— Molecular and Cell Biology πŸ”— Surrey πŸ”— Running πŸ”— Molecular Biology πŸ”— Molecular Biology/Molecular and Cell Biology

Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Despite these accomplishments, he was not fully recognised in his home country during his lifetime, due to his homosexuality, and because much of his work was covered by the Official Secrets Act.

During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section that was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Here, he devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.

Turing played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic, and in so doing helped win the war. Due to the problems of counterfactual history, it is hard to estimate the precise effect Ultra intelligence had on the war, but at the upper end it has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14Β million lives.

After the war Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the Automatic Computing Engine. The Automatic Computing Engine was one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Machine Laboratory, at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he helped develop the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s.

Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts; the Labouchere Amendment of 1885 had mandated that "gross indecency" was a criminal offence in the UK. He accepted chemical castration treatment, with DES, as an alternative to prison. Turing died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death as a suicide, but it has been noted that the known evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning.

In 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling way he was treated". Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a posthumous pardon in 2013. The Alan Turing law is now an informal term for a 2017 law in the United Kingdom that retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts.

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πŸ”— Jonathan James

πŸ”— Biography πŸ”— Law πŸ”— Computer Security πŸ”— Computer Security/Computing πŸ”— Biography/science and academia πŸ”— Florida

Jonathan Joseph James (December 12, 1983 – May 18, 2008) was an American hacker who was the first juvenile incarcerated for cybercrime in the United States. The South Florida native was 15 years old at the time of the first offense and 16 years old on the date of his sentencing. He died at his Pinecrest, Florida home on May 18, 2008, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

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πŸ”— Isambard Kingdom Brunel

πŸ”— Biography πŸ”— London πŸ”— Trains πŸ”— Civil engineering πŸ”— Ships πŸ”— River Thames πŸ”— Wiltshire πŸ”— Hampshire πŸ”— Bristol πŸ”— Trains/UK Railways

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (; 9 April 1806 – 15 September 1859) was a British civil engineer who is considered "one of the most ingenious and prolific figures in engineering history", "one of the 19th-century engineering giants", and "one of the greatest figures of the Industrial Revolution, [who] changed the face of the English landscape with his groundbreaking designs and ingenious constructions". Brunel built dockyards, the Great Western Railway (GWR), a series of steamships including the first propeller-driven transatlantic steamship, and numerous important bridges and tunnels. His designs revolutionised public transport and modern engineering.

Though Brunel's projects were not always successful, they often contained innovative solutions to long-standing engineering problems. During his career, Brunel achieved many engineering firsts, including assisting in the building of the first tunnel under a navigable river and the development of SSΒ Great Britain, the first propeller-driven, ocean-going, iron ship, which, when launched in 1843, was the largest ship ever built.

On the GWR, Brunel set standards for a well-built railway, using careful surveys to minimise gradients and curves. This necessitated expensive construction techniques, new bridges, new viaducts, and the two-mile (3.2Β km) long Box Tunnel. One controversial feature was the wide gauge, a "broad gauge" of 7Β ftΒ 1⁄4Β in (2,140Β mm), instead of what was later to be known as "standard gauge" of 4Β ftΒ 8Β 1⁄2Β in (1,435Β mm). He astonished Britain by proposing to extend the GWR westward to North America by building steam-powered, iron-hulled ships. He designed and built three ships that revolutionised naval engineering: the SSΒ Great Western (1838), the SSΒ Great Britain (1843), and the SSΒ Great Eastern (1859).

In 2002, Brunel was placed second in a BBC public poll to determine the "100 Greatest Britons". In 2006, the bicentenary of his birth, a major programme of events celebrated his life and work under the name Brunel 200.

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πŸ”— Jerry Pournelle has died

πŸ”— Biography πŸ”— Science Fiction πŸ”— Biography/arts and entertainment πŸ”— Journalism

Jerry Eugene Pournelle (; August 7, 1933 – September 8, 2017) was an American polymath: scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he worked in the aerospace industry, but eventually focused on his writing career. In an obituary in gizmodo, he is described as "a tireless ambassador for the future."

Pournelle is particularly known for writing hard science fiction, and received multiple awards for his writing. In addition to his solo writing, he wrote several novels with collaborators, most notably Larry Niven. Pournelle served a term as President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Pournelle's journalism focused primarily on the computer industry, astronomy, and space exploration. From the 1970s until the early 1990s, he contributed to the computer magazine Byte, writing from the viewpoint of an intelligent user, with the oft-cited credo, β€œWe do this stuff so you won’t have to.” He created one of the first blogs, entitled "Chaos Manor", which included commentary about politics, computer technology, space technology, and science fiction.

Pournelle was also known for his paleoconservative political views, which were sometimes expressed in his fiction. He was one of the founders of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy, which developed some of the Reagan Administration's space initiatives, including the earliest versions of what would become the Strategic Defense Initiative.

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πŸ”— Gall's Law

πŸ”— Biography πŸ”— Systems πŸ”— Biography/arts and entertainment

John Gall (September 18, 1925 – December 15, 2014) was an American author and retired pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book General systemantics: an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., a critique of systems theory. One of the statements from this book has become known as Gall's law.

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πŸ”— Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

πŸ”— Biography πŸ”— Women scientists πŸ”— Biography/science and academia πŸ”— Women's History πŸ”— Astronomy πŸ”— Smithsonian Institution Archives

Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin (nΓ©e Payne; (1900-05-10)May 10, 1900 – (1979-12-07)December 7, 1979) was a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist who proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth. Independent observations eventually proved she was actually correct

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πŸ”— Ward Christensen has died (of BBS and XMODEM fame)

πŸ”— Biography

Ward Christensen (born 1945 in West Bend, Wisconsin, United States) was the co-founder of the CBBS bulletin board, the first bulletin board system (BBS) ever brought online. Christensen, along with partner Randy Suess, members of the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange (CACHE), started development during a blizzard in Chicago, Illinois, and officially established CBBS four weeks later, on February 16, 1978. CACHE members frequently shared programs and had long been discussing some form of file transfer, and the two used the downtime during the blizzard to implement it.

Christensen was noted for building software tools for his needs. He wrote a cassette-based operating system before floppies and hard disks were common. When he lost track of the source code for some programs, he wrote ReSource, an iterative disassembler for the Intel 8080, to help him regenerate the source code. When he needed to send files to Randy Suess, he wrote XMODEM.

Jerry Pournelle wrote in 1983 of a collection of CP/M public-domain software that "probably 50 percent of the really good programs were written by Ward Christensen, a public benefactor." Christensen received two 1992 Dvorak Awards for Excellence in Telecommunications, one with Randy Suess for developing the first BBS, and a lifetime achievement award "for outstanding contributions to PC telecommunications." In 1993, he received the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Christensen worked at IBM from 1968 until his retirement in 2012. His last position with IBM was field technical sales specialist.

In May 2005, Christensen and Suess were both featured in BBS: The Documentary.

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πŸ”— Al-Jazari

πŸ”— Biography πŸ”— Biography/science and academia πŸ”— Middle Ages πŸ”— Islam πŸ”— Middle Ages/History πŸ”— Watches πŸ”— Islam/Muslim scholars

BadΔ«ΚΏ az-Zaman Abu l-ΚΏIzz ibn Ismāʿīl ibn ar-Razāz al-JazarΔ« (1136–1206, Arabic: بديع Ψ§Ω„Ψ²Ω…Ψ§Ω† أَبُ Ψ§ΩŽΩ„Ω’ΨΉΩΨ²Ω Ψ₯بْنُ Ψ₯Ψ³Ω’Ω…Ψ§ΨΉΩΩŠΩ„Ω Ψ₯بْنُ الرِّزاز Ψ§Ω„Ψ¬Ψ²Ψ±ΩŠβ€Ž, IPA:Β [Γ¦ldΚ’Γ¦zΓ¦riː]) was a Muslim polymath: a scholar, inventor, mechanical engineer, artisan, artist and mathematician. He is best known for writing The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (Arabic: ΩƒΨͺΨ§Ψ¨ في معرفة Ψ§Ω„Ψ­ΩŠΩ„ Ψ§Ω„Ω‡Ω†Ψ―Ψ³ΩŠΨ©β€Ž, romanized:Β Kitab fi ma'rifat al-hiyal al-handasiya, lit.Β 'Book in knowledge of engineering tricks') in 1206, where he described 100 mechanical devices, some 80 of which are trick vessels of various kinds, along with instructions on how to construct them.

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πŸ”— Vasili Arkhipov – Soviet Navy Officer Who Prevented Nuclear Strike in 1962

πŸ”— Biography πŸ”— Soviet Union πŸ”— Russia πŸ”— Military history πŸ”— Military history/Military biography πŸ”— Biography/military biography πŸ”— Military history/Maritime warfare πŸ”— Military history/Cold War πŸ”— Cold War πŸ”— Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history πŸ”— Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history πŸ”— Russia/history of Russia

Vasily Arkhipov (Russian: Василий Архипов) may refer to:

  • Vasily Arkhipov (vice admiral) (1926–1998), Soviet Navy officer credited with casting the single vote that prevented a Soviet nuclear strike
  • Vasily Arkhipov (general) (1906–1985), Commander of the 53rd Guards Tank Brigade of the Red Army during World War II, twice Hero of the Soviet Union


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