A celebration to mark the 100th anniversary of Codebreaker and Computer Pioneer Alan Turing’s birth has been scheduled at King's College, Cambridge for June 15-16, 2012.

Over a dozen of the world's leading scholars and experts including several family members and friends along with a special appearance by Turing's last surviving wartime colleague from Station X will be on hand to celebrate Turing's unique impact on mathematics, computing, computer science, informatics, morphogenesis, artificial intelligence, philosophy and the wider scientific world.

A series of lectures have been organized covering the Second World War, the development of our technological society, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, the theory and practice of computing, and the understanding of the human mind. Not to be missed!

For more information, please visit Turing's 100th Year

Stephen Neale, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, discusses Bertrand Russell's seminal paper "On Denoting" published in the journal MIND in 1905 and the ensuing philosophical debate centered around it.

Ezra T. Newman, Emeritus professor of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh and resident Einstein expert for Simply Charly, won the prestigious Einstein Prize which is awarded biennially. For full story, click here.

Charles Dickens was born 200 years ago today in the town of Portsmouth, England. According to Claire Tomalin's 2011 biography "Charles Dickens: A Life," his childhood home was happy and comfortable, but his father tended to live beyond his means, and the family was uprooted more than once. On the worst of these occasions, 12-year-old Charles was sent to work in a boot-black factory. He didn't like it. But it became material -- there was a boy there named Fagin, a name that will ring familiar to readers of "Oliver Twist." More...

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IN March 2009, an eternity ago in Silicon Valley, a small team of engineers here was in a big hurry to rethink the future of books. Not the paper-and-ink books that have been around since the days of Gutenberg, the ones that the doomsayers proclaim — with glee or dread — will go the way of vinyl records. More...

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Approaching Gertrude Stein’s writing critically is tricky. Because she strove to reshape literary conventions — syntax, language usage, narrative order and the sense of making sense — any comment on her choices may already be rebuffed in her poetics and practice. Stein is a trickster. This may be why, as I read “Ida” and “Stanzas in Meditation,” both reissued in corrected, authoritative editions from Yale University Press, I remembered a Jonathan Richman lyric I’ll paraphrase as “Pablo Picasso never got called a jackass.” More...

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A new crop of digital books comes loaded with videos, songs, animated shorts and pop-up graphics. Is this the future of publishing? More...

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In 1889, when Friedrich Nietzsche suffered the mental collapse that ended his career, he was virtually unknown. Yet by the time of his death in 1900 at the age of 55, he had become the philosophical celebrity of his age. From Russia to America, admirers echoed his estimation of himself as a titanic figure who could alter the course of history: “I am by far the most terrible human being that has existed so far; this does not preclude the possibility that I shall be the most beneficial.” His origins were humble for the role. The son of a small-town Lutheran minister, he steeped himself in classical literature while growing up in eastern Germany. When he was 24, he secured a professorship in Basel, Switzerland, and a few years later published his first book, “The Birth of Tragedy.” Against the common view of the ancient Greeks as the epitome of serene equipoise, Nietzsche emphasized the “Dionysian” excess and frenzy that complemented the “Apollonian” virtues of clarity and repose. The book’s success was limited, and its author was mocked by one leading classicist as an atavist run amok who should “gather tigers and panthers about his knees, but not the youth of Germany.” More...

Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud are known as the fathers of psychoanalysis, but they focused on different things. Freud's attention was on the sexual underpinnings of — well, almost everything — and Jung was known for his mystical bent and dream theories.

For years, the two were close friends and collaborators but they had a falling out that ultimately ended their relationship. Turns out, there was a woman involved. Her name was Sabina Spielren.

The stories of all three are woven together in a new film, A Dangerous Method. More...

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Since the mid-1960s John Brockman has been at the cutting edge of ideas. He is a passionate advocate of both science and the arts, and his website Edge is a salon for the world's finest minds. More...

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