Better Science Through Art

Dr Richard P. Gabriel, Distinguished Engineer, IBM research, will speak on "Better Science Through Art", 7 December 2010, 12.30-1.30pm at the Australian National University in Canberra. He will also be speaking with Dr Guy Steele on "50 in 50: 50 Programming Languages in 50 Years", 9 December 2010.

Public Lecture

Better science through art

Common wisdom says that science and art are entirely different beasts; moreover, a similar source of wisdom tells us that science is valuable to society while art is a luxury. Why else would schools drop art from their curricula over the past 20 years? But artists and scientists approach their work in similar if not identical ways, and if you want to be a better scientist, maybe you should try to become a better artist.

Dr Richard P. Gabriel gained his PhD from Stanford University in 1981 and has also completed a Master of Fine Arts (Creative Writing-poetry) from Warren Wilson College in 1998. He is also a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Dr Gabriel is a distinguished engineer conducting programming language and software engineering research at IBM Research. He is the author of five books on various topics including Lisp benchmarking, software and patterns, creative writing, a poetry collection and software development. He was the first person after Donald Knuth to write a comprehensive TeX macro set and he played lead guitar in a rock 'n' roll band for 20 years.

Speaker: Dr Richard P. Gabriel

Venue: The Finkel Lecture Theatre, The John Curtin School of Medical Research, Garran Road

Date: Tuesday, 7 December 2010

Time: 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM

Enquiries: Heather McEwen on 6125 6601, ANU Events on 6125 4144