Your favorite scientist/physitist/programmer?
- Albert Einstein
- Stephen Hawking
- Carl Sagan
- Linus Torvalds
- Carl Jung
- Thomas Edison
- Issac Newton
- Steve Jobs
I find Jung’s set of rational, tangible models for our fuzzy, abstract suite of behaviours the most interesting of that list.
Perhaps Einstein is second (for me) because he does a similar thing but I find his stuff harder to understand than Jung’s, and if I can’t understand it then of course it doesn’t grab me as much.
I can’t understand Hawking at all, or maybe I don’t have a good enough attention span.
Mine are similar.
I definitely like Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking, Newton and Edison. I also like Maxwell, Tesla, Faraday, Plank, and Schrödinger, to name a few. As far as programming, I like Linus Torvalds (that’s a duh), Gustavo Neimeyer, and Jeff Johnson.
I enjoy theoretical physics and quantum physics.
Hey guys,
I was just having trouble posting this as
a “poll” with a one choice and then a
voting option, can you help me?
LinuxMonster761
I’ve used my mod powers to poke around seeing if I could convert the thread to a poll. I can’t see a way to do that. Probably you have to do that at thread-creation time. If you start a new thread and correctly put your poll up front on it, I can then move this thread onto that new one for you. You would need to PM me that you’ve made a new thread or I won’t know about it. When you start a thread, the option to make it into a poll is contained in the lowest panel entitled “Additional Options”.
What’s your favorite scientist/programmer?
RMS, definitely. I like Heisenberg’s style of writing, I like Planck’s and Maxwell’s ideas while Pascal is sheer joy to read, but, in the present world, I feel that RMS’s importance is both huge and heavily underestimated. Even in the FLOSS community itself, there are apparently very few people who fully understand that the FLOSS movement as such is actually not so much about software as it is about ideas and social interaction. The majority wrongly assumes the difference between Free and proprietary software to be merely a technical one. They generally think that it would only make a negligible difference if software were licensed as freeware/shareware/donationware instead of being GPL-ed. Well, nothing could be farther from the truth. One of the major breaktroughs in software in the last 50 years has been not a technological one, but a socio-philosophical one. Sadly, RMS is not only the greatest philosopher in the software industry, he’s also the only one. And as much as I may like Torvalds and the immense work he did for the FLOSS movement in general, philosophically he’s no match for RMS – or for Tanenbaum, for that matter. In IT, as in every other field, there are two kinds of people: those who “just do it” and then wash their hands, and those who feel responsible for what becomes of their invention, to what purposes it’s put to, what repercussions it has on the world at large. The majority is of the “doer” type who invents the nuclear bomb and never cares what it’ll be used for; and then there’s the minority (in software, sadly, consisting of only one individual – RMS) who actually thinks ahead and asks all those uncomfortable questions which shape the future of our world. So the dilemma is: what sort of world do we envision for our (grand)children – a proprietary world of DRMs with our own hardware spying on us and reporting to the Big Brother, or a world of liberty and of choice? Well, without the work of RMS, that question would have no sense, since there would be no second alternative to speak of.
Very – very – few people realize that.
And excuse me for being so lengthy.
I didn’t know Dickie Smith’s middle initial was M.
Well, now you do.
No question Einstein was a very intelligent man Newton and Hawking as well as well and at the risk of leaving out any other great minds I think that Carl Sagan was an amazing man. However I would like to point out one name that is not in this list. His name was Euclid, and the reason I like him from what I understand of him is that he professed a form of mathematics and geometry that was lacking the illogical indirect forms that so many scientists today embrace. To me that indicates a greater understanding of how things work than the vast majority of the human race including the greatest of the minds
Where’s the Dr. Frank N. Furter choice?
I have to mention John Carmack here. He is very high on my list, with Ken Silverman.
I know it’s kind of cliche, but I had to vote for Einstein. The man is the closest living person to a genious. The stuff he came up with (especially considering his time period) was incredible.