Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Keyword
Articles 1 - 11 of 11
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Algorithm's Cradle: Commemorating Al-Khwarizmi In The Soviet History Of Mathematics And Cold War Computer Science, Ksenia Tatarchenko
Algorithm's Cradle: Commemorating Al-Khwarizmi In The Soviet History Of Mathematics And Cold War Computer Science, Ksenia Tatarchenko
Research Collection College of Integrative Studies
This chapter investigates the origin narratives and commemoration practices that came hand in hand with the growing cultural authority of the algorithm after World War II, culminating in celebrations in honor of the 1,200th anniversary of the medieval scholar Abu MODIFIER LETTER LEFT HALF RINGAdallah Muhammad Ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. I first show how al-Khwarizmi's legacy was claimed by Soviet historians of mathematics aiming to construct a history inspired by dialectical materialism, a goal that eventually led to arguments about the distinct, algorithmic character of mathematics in the East. Next, I study how these ideas were appropriated by the international community …
Man-Machine Dialogues: Computer Representations And Appropriations In The Soviet Union And The United States, Ksenia Tatarchenko
Man-Machine Dialogues: Computer Representations And Appropriations In The Soviet Union And The United States, Ksenia Tatarchenko
Research Collection College of Integrative Studies
What brought a plurality of information societies into existence? The global process of computerizations went hand in hand with political competition between the First and Second World during the second half of the twentieth century. Non-capitalist information societies were imagined and experienced under the socialistregimes alongside and in interaction with their better-known capitalist counterparts. Both capitalism and socialism asserted the power of the new machines to depict and create a better world.
Russian Logics And The Culture Of Impossible: Part Ii: Reinterpreting Algorithmic Rationality, Ksenia Tatarchenko, Anya Yermakova, Liesbeth De Mol
Russian Logics And The Culture Of Impossible: Part Ii: Reinterpreting Algorithmic Rationality, Ksenia Tatarchenko, Anya Yermakova, Liesbeth De Mol
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This article reinterprets algorithmic rationality by looking at the interaction between mathematical logic, mechanized reasoning, and, later, computing in the Russian Imperial and Soviet contexts to offer a history of the algorithm as a mathematical object bridging the inner and outer worlds, a humanistic vision that we, following logician Vladimir Uspensky, call the “culture of the impossible.” We unfold the deep roots of this vision as embodied in scientific intelligentsia. In Part I, we examine continuities between the turn-of-the-twentieth-century discussions of poznaniye—an epistemic orientation towards the process of knowledge acquisition—and the postwar rise of the Soviet school of mathematical logic. …
The Ehrenfests’ Use Of Toy Models To Explore Irreversibility In Statistical Mechanics, Joshua Luczak, Lena Zuchowski
The Ehrenfests’ Use Of Toy Models To Explore Irreversibility In Statistical Mechanics, Joshua Luczak, Lena Zuchowski
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This article highlights and discusses the Ehrenfests’ use of toy models to explore irreversibility in statistical mechanics. In particular, we explore their urn and P–Q models and highlight that, while the former was primarily used to provide a simple counter-example to Zermelo’s objection to Boltzmann’s statistical mechanical underpinning of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the latter was intended to highlight the role and importance of the Stoßzahlansatz as a cause of the tendency of systems to exhibit entropy increase. We also explain the sense in which these models are toy models and why agents can use them, as the Ehrenfests’ …
Thinking Algorithmically: From Cold War Computer Science To The Socialist Information Culture, Ksenia Tatarchenko
Thinking Algorithmically: From Cold War Computer Science To The Socialist Information Culture, Ksenia Tatarchenko
Research Collection College of Integrative Studies
Cold War competition shaped the process of computerization in both East and West during the second half of the twentieth century. This article combines insights from Science and Technology Studies, which brought the analysis of Cold War technopolitics beyond the context of the nation-state, with approaches from Critical Algorithm Studies, to question the algorithm's role in the global "computer revolution." It traces the algorithm's trajectory across several geographical, political, and discursive spaces to argue that its mutable cultural valences made the algorithm a universalizing attribute for representing human-machine interactions across the ideological divide. It shows that discourses about the human …
How Many Aims Are We Aiming At?, Joshua Luczak
How Many Aims Are We Aiming At?, Joshua Luczak
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
I highlight that the aim of using statistical mechanics to underpin irreversible processes is, strictly speaking, ambiguous. Traditionally, however, the task of underpinning irreversible processes has been thought to be synonymous with underpinning the Second Law of thermodynamics. I claim that contributors to the foundational discussion are best interpreted as aiming to provide a microphysical justification of the Minus First Law, despite the ways their aims are often stated. I suggest that contributors should aim at accounting for both the Minus First Law and Second Law.
"The Computer Does Not Believe In Tears": Soviet Programming, Professionalization, And The Gendering Of Authority, Ksenia Tatarchenko
"The Computer Does Not Believe In Tears": Soviet Programming, Professionalization, And The Gendering Of Authority, Ksenia Tatarchenko
Research Collection College of Integrative Studies
By the middle of the 1960s, the Soviet press routinely exalted computers as the “machines of communism,” and the new programming profession had become familiar enough to make a programmer the main hero of a science iction novel. he Strugatskys’ immensely popular Monday Begins on Saturday—the title referring to a kind of work that knows no holidays—is a satirical fable where scientiic research masqueraded as magic. The novel opens with a fantastical institute staf headhunting a young programmer, Aleksandr Privalov. At the heart of the plot is the inculcation of the protagonist with a scientists’ work ethic as Aleksandr befriends …
Talk About Toy Models, Joshua Luczak
Talk About Toy Models, Joshua Luczak
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Scientific models are frequently discussed in philosophy of science. A great deal of the discussion is centred on approximation, idealisation, and on how these models achieve their representational function. Despite the importance, distinct nature, and high presence of toy models, they have received little attention from philosophers. This paper hopes to remedy this situation. It aims to elevate the status of toy models: by distinguishing them from approximations and idealisations, by highlighting and elaborating on several ways the Kac ring, a simple statistical mechanical model, is used as a toy model, and by explaining why toy models can be used …
On How To Approach The Approach To Equilibrium, Joshua Luczak
On How To Approach The Approach To Equilibrium, Joshua Luczak
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This article highlights the limitations of typicality accounts of thermodynamic behavior so as to promote an alternative line of research: understanding and accounting for the success of the techniques and equations physicists use to model the behavior of systems that begin away from equilibrium. This article also takes steps in this promising direction. It examines a technique commonly used to model the behavior of an important kind of system: a Brownian particle that has been introduced to an isolated fluid at equilibrium. It also accounts for the success of the model, by identifying and grounding the technique's key assumptions.
Thinking On The Edge: Heidegger, Derrida, And The Daoist Gateway (Men), Steven Burik
Thinking On The Edge: Heidegger, Derrida, And The Daoist Gateway (Men), Steven Burik
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Steven Bunk Many philosophical interpretations of the Daoist classics have proceeded, or continue to proceed, to read into these works the quest for a transcendental, foundational principle, a permanent moment of rest beyond the turmoil of everchanging things. The metaphysics that may be understood to be at work in such interpretations is what Heidegger and Derrida have called philosophy as ontotheology. It is argued here that Heidegger, Derrida, and the classical Daoists are better understood not so much as metaphysical and essentialist thinkers but as advocates of a profoundly inner-worldly way of thinking. In arguing for such a different approach, …
Cold War Origins Of The International Federation For Information Processing, Ksenia Tatarchenko
Cold War Origins Of The International Federation For Information Processing, Ksenia Tatarchenko
Research Collection College of Integrative Studies
The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) was born as a nongovernmental federation with the main goal of bringing together computer professionals from countries in the East and West. This article examines the Cold War context of the IFIP's origins and the mechanisms its founders used to reconcile computing and politics and to construct computing as an international discipline.