[SGVLUG] Fwd: MITx is open for enrollment

[Dustin Laurence]

On 02/13/2012 11:50 AM, Joel Witherspoon wrote:

> Something I picked up this morning.

Just in case anyone is interested in the course but doesn't doesn't know 
the name, the co-professor for the course, Gerry Sussman, is one of the 
last generation of people who can genuinely be called old-school MIT 
lisp hackers of the same circles that people like Richard Stallman came 
from (that's actually unkind--Sussman is far closer than Stallman to the 
original Hacker ideal, being a powerful theoretician as well as a coder) 
and at least a minor deity in CS circles.  He was a co-author of many 
famous things: the "Lambda the Ultimate" series of papers, the Scheme 
programming language, the "Wizard Book" (The Structure And 
Interpretation Of Computer Programs), and so on.

I didn't know he had hardware interests, but it doesn't surprise me a 
bit, as he seems to be something of a renaissance man in terms of 
breadth without being shallow.  He visited Caltech and hung out with the 
general relativity people once just to see what their computational 
problems were (I think his interest was in the fully relativistic fluid 
dynamics problem that was going to be a Grand Challenge item, though I 
might have the precise time-frame wrong).  He seemed to have enough 
physics and mathematics to hold up his end of the conversation with 
people who think that differential geometry is kindergarten math.  That 
really impressed me later when I thought about it, because most CS 
professors don't seem to have a powerful command of continuous mathematics.

What I'm trying to say is that what he has to say is worth listening to 
regardless of the subject.

Taking this course would be a really great study group effort for a 
hackerspace or a LUG with a lot of hardware interests.

Dustin