SCIENTIFIC PROGRAMS AND ACTIVITIES

December 22, 2024

October 16, 2011
Sundays at 3 pm (doors open at 2:15)

MacLeod Auditorium, Medical Sciences Building, University of Toronto
1 King’s College Circle (Nearest Subway is Queen’s Park Station)
Co-sponsored by the Fields Institute

Keith Devlin
Stanford University

Leonardo and Steve: How Fibonacci beat Apple to market by 800 Years

The first personal computing revolution took place not in Silicon Valley in the 1980s but in Pisa in the 13th Century. The medieval counterpart to Steve Jobs was a young Italian called Leonardo, better known today by the nickname Fibonacci. Thanks to a recently discovered manuscript in a library in Florence, the story of how this little known genius came to launch the modern commercial world can now be told.
Dr. Keith Devlin, mathematician, is a co-founder and Executive Director of Stanford University's H-STAR institute, a co-founder of the Stanford Media X research network, and a Senior Researcher at CSLI. He is a World Economic Forum Fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His current research is focused on the use of different media to teach and communicate mathematics to diverse audiences. He also works on the design of information/reasoning systems for intelligence analysis. Other research interests include: theory of information, models of reasoning, applications of mathematical techniques in the study of communication, and mathematical cognition. He has written 31 books and over 80 published research articles. Recipient of the Pythagoras Prize, the Peano Prize, the Carl Sagan Award, and the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics Communications Award. In 2003, he was recognized by the California State Assembly for his "innovative work and longtime service in the field of mathematics and its relation to logic and linguistics." He is "the Math Guy" on National Public Radio.
Airing on TVO, Ontario's public television network:
5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, December 17 and 18, 2011
1:30 a.m. Friday, December 23, 2011
5:00 a.m. Saturday and Sunday, December 24 and 25, 2011

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