Tag Archives: MIT

Jew of the Week: Ray Kurzweil

“Revolutionary Who Made America”

Ray Kurzweil

Raymond Kurzweil (b. 1948) was born in New York to Austrian-Jewish parents who escaped Europe before the start of World War II. He was fascinated by science-fiction from a young age and by age 5, decided that he wanted to be an inventor. He was already designing and building computers by 12, and developed a theory for the neocortex of the brain by 14. The following year he wrote his first computer program, and a couple years later won the International Science Fair for creating a computer that could compose music. While studying at MIT, he created a program that matches high school students with colleges, and sold it for the equivalent of about $700,000 in today’s value. In 1974, Kurzweil created a scanner that could read most fonts, then used the technology to create a reading machine for the blind. At the behest of Stevie Wonder, Kurzweil then turned to improving music technology, inventing a new generation of synthesizers whose quality was indistinguishable from that of live instruments. Kurzweil went on to develop one of the first speech recognition systems, followed by devices that assist people with learning disabilities, blindness, ADD, and dyslexia. He published his first book in 1990, followed by six more to date, mostly about the future of technology, as well as nutrition and health. Five of the books have been bestsellers. Many of his predictions about the future have already come true. Kurzweil has won a great number of awards, and has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, while being described as one of the “revolutionaries who made America”. He now works full-time for Google, developing machine learning and language processing. When he dies, Kurzweil intends to have his body cryogenically frozen and stored until a future time when technology might resurrect him.

Words of the Week

If you drop gold and books, pick up first the books, and then the gold.
– Sefer Hasidim

Jews of the Week: Nathan Rosen & Brian Podolsky

Podolsky and Rosen

Nathan Rosen (1909-1995) was born in Brooklyn and studied at MIT during the Great Depression. While still young, he published several famous papers, including ‘The Neutron’, which predicted the structure of the nucleus a year before it was discovered. Between 1935 and 1945 he was Albert Einstein’s personal assistant at Princeton. Together, they discovered (mathematically) a “bridge” connecting distant areas of space – now called a wormhole. With Einstein’s encouragement, Rosen moved to the nascent State of Israel and joined Haifa’s Technion in 1953. He later served as President of Ben-Gurion University, founded the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Physical Society of Israel, and the International Society for General Relativity and Gravitation. Aside from all this, he is most famous for coming up with the well-known “EPR Paradox” together with Einstein and a fellow Jewish scientist named Podolsky (hence “EPR”).

Boris Yakovlevich Podolsky (1896-1966) was born in Russia to a poor Jewish family which immigrated to the U.S. in 1913. He served in the US Army and worked as an electrical engineer before returning to school and earning a PhD from Caltech. In 1933 he was given a fellowship at Princeton, which led to his collaboration with Einstein and Rosen on the EPR Paradox. Interestingly, some have suggested that Podolsky was a Soviet spy, codenamed “Quantum”, and helped the Soviets start their nuclear program during World War II. His major legacy, however, is in the great work he did on solving various complex physics problems of the day.

Words of the Week

Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.
– Albert Einstein

Jew of the Week: Benjamin Netanyahu

Prime Minister of Israel

Binyamin Netanyahu (b. 1949) Two-time prime minister of Israel, he fought in both the 1967 and ’73 wars. Netanyahu was a special forces operative in the IDF’s elite Sayeret Matkal unit for five years, participating in some of Israel’s most daring missions. His political career started off as ambassador to the U.N. Later he would serve as Israel’s finance minister, foreign minister, health minister, pension affairs minister and economic strategy minister. Netanyahu holds a B.Sc in architecture and an M.Sc in business from MIT and studied political science at Harvard. While in America, he went by the name Ben Nitay, a reference to the Talmudic sage Nitay HaArbeli, whose most famous dictum is “Distance yourself from a bad neighbour, do not associate with a wicked person and do not despair of retribution.” (Pirkei Avot 1:7) Interestingly, Netanyahu is the only Israeli prime minister in history to have actually been born in Israel. He has written five books. He is also a descendant of the Vilna Gaon.

UPDATE: Since this post was first published in 2011, Netanyahu has become Israel’s longest-service prime minister. Over his tenure, Israel has experienced some of its greatest economic and population growth; significantly strengthened its borders and reduced the number of terror victims; and managed to sign multiple peace treaties with Arab neighbours.

UPDATE 2: Netanyahu’s tenure as Israel’s prime minister ended on June 13, 2021. He served for a total of 15 years and 92 days, the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history.

From the History Vault

The church and the government of Rome set Wednesday, March 6, 1430, as the day when all the Jews of Rome must convert or face death. On that day a massive earthquake struck Rome and many of the archbishops and priests who conceived the decree were killed. Following the earthquake, Pope Martin V annulled the decree.