Huston Cummings Smith was a religious studies scholar in the United States. His book The World’s Religions has sold over two million copies and remains a popular introduction to comparative religion. He was a Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Religion at Syracuse University. Smith studied at Central Methodist University and the University of Chicago. He…
Jaron Zepel Lanier is an American computer scientist, best known for popularizing the term virtual reality (VR). A pioneer in the field of VR, Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves. In the late 1990s, Lanier worked on applications…
Uri Maoz is an Israeli-Slovakian post-doctoral scholar in the Division of Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He received his BS in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he was a member of the Amirim Honors Program for Outstanding Students. Moaz further received a PhD from the Hebrew University’s Interdisciplinary Center…
George P. Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. Although some of his research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, such as the conditions under which a certain linguistic construction is grammatically viable, he is most famous for his ideas…
Michio Kaku is an American theoretical physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York, a futurist, and a communicator and popularizer of science. He has written several books about physics and related topics; he has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and…
Stuart Alan Kauffman is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. Kauffman graduated from Dartmouth in 1960, was awarded the BA (Hons) by Oxford University (where he was a Marshall Scholar) in 1963, and completed a medical degree (MD) at the University of California, San Francisco…
Raymond “Ray” Kurzweil is an American author, inventor, futurist, and Director of Engineering at Google. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and…
William Albert Dembski is an American philosopher and theologian. He is currently the Philip E. Johnson Research Professor in Culture & Science at the Southern Evangelical Seminary at Matthews, North Carolina, and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Dembski is the author of a number of books about intelligent…
Neil Gillman (1933 – 2017) was an American rabbi and philosopher, affiliated with Conservative Judaism. He graduated from McGill University in 1954. He was ordained as a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1960. He received his PhD in philosophy from Columbia University in 1975. He is a member of the Conservative…
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley researching phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of psychology and literature. Dreyfus is known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger, which critics labeled “Dreydegger”. Many of his students have gone to do work on themes related to…
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual. She is the author of 10 books of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction, including The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us (2026), 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Betraying Spinoza, and Plato at the Googleplex. She holds a PhD…
Freeman John Dyson was a British-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum electrodynamics, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering. Dyson was a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and lived in Princeton, New Jersey, for over fifty years. Dyson was also a member…