This short bio of an interesting character appears in Harvard Magazine. Enjoy! https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2023/09/features-vita-arthur-augustus-johnson ..read more

The Crimson asked me to weigh in on the SCOTUS ruling against Harvard. My piece ("Unfinished Business") is now up. It's Harvard-specific. I don't think losing this case will actually matter much to Harvard, given that the majority opinion invites colleges to consider race in its admissions practices insofar as race matters to the experience of the individual applicant. Harvard's process is so unmechanized and individualized already that I bet the outcomes will be very similar in the future. Not so, I imagine, at other institutions reliant on rule-based systems for making admissions decisions ..read more

 A video recording of my Skolem Lecture in Oslo on the Birth of Binary is now available here. The Birth of Binary: Leibniz and the Origins of Computer Arithmetic The curious history of the binary number system includes a multimillennial prehistory and a few early seventeenth-century sparks that did not catch fire. Though several others independently came up with the binary system, my recent translation and edition (with British intellectual historian Lloyd Strickland) of mostly unpublished works on binary by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) establishes Leibniz as the key progenitor o ..read more

(This piece is jointly authored by Harry Lewis and Bill Gasarch, who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland at College Park.) There are elections in Hong Kong, but to get on the ballot you have to be nominated by a committee controlled by Beijing government.   Elections for the Harvard Board of Overseers—one of Harvard’s two governing bodies—are almost as well-controlled. A Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) nominating committee curates a slate of candidates, from which alumni make their selections.   But an alternative route to get on the Harvard ballot e ..read more

Following publication of my edition, with Lloyd Strickland, of Leibniz's writings on binary arithmetic, I'll be giving the annual Thoralf Skolem Memorial Lecture at the University of Oslo on December 8, and it will be both live-streamed and recorded. The lecture will be at 1:15pm Oslo time, which is 7:15am EST. Here is the full information, including the Zoom link (I imagine a link to the recording will at some point be posted on the last page linked below): The 2022 Thoralf Skolem Memorial Lecture Harry Lewis, Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. The Bi ..read more

The imperative to show our commitment to redress social injustices, even if it means overshooting the mark, takes Harvard to positions that are, if not literally indefensible, far beyond what most of the community would be willing to defend. Extreme positions may even offend and injure the very people they are voiced to advance. To declare such a position is "virtue signaling"--broadcasting to some audience our own good intentions, regardless of antipathy such declarations may excite in the general public or the resentment that may result in the affected population. Some years ago, for example ..read more

 Noted civil libertarian and free speech advocate Harvey Silverglate is trying to be elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers. I know Harvey well and have never met a more principled person -- and on top of that, I admire the principles he stands for and his way of defending them, even though we don't always agree on how they should play out in practice. He is exactly the kind of no-BS person who should be on the Board of Overseers to challenge Harvard's authoritarian tendencies and the verbal dreck Harvard too often uses to justify positions that cannot survive rational scrutiny. Most O ..read more

I’ll be a keynote speaker at the IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering (TALE) in December. My topic is “Why and How to Teach the Classic Papers,” and I will be describing the experience of reading about 50 classic computer science papers with about 150 computer science students per year. The course is Harvard’s CS191, and I have collected the papers, each with a brief introduction, into an MIT Press volume Ideas That Created the Future, now in its third printing.   This conference is in Hong Kong. I will be speaking remotely ..read more

The Harvard Crimson yesterday published my op-ed on preregistration (AKA the end of "shopping period"), a matter expected to be voted by the Faculty on May 3. (On this matter, see also the excellent letters in Harvard Magazine by Howard Georgi and an impressive list of alumni, not that I expect such sentiments to have much traction with the faculty or the current administration.) I have long been puzzled that the humanities faculty seem favorably disposed toward preregistration, which will mark the end of any hope they have of attracting new students into their fields. As the College beco ..read more

 A recent meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences was devoted largely to undergraduate education. That is a rarity, and an uninformed reader, hearing that, might hope that the tragic crisis in Europe had resulted in some introspection on the larger purpose of higher education in a democracy, along the lines that motivated the educational classic, General Education in a Free Society (aka Harvard’s 1945 “Red Book”). After all, for better or worse, Harvard educates many leaders of state, much of the judiciary, and many titans of industry. Harvard has a role in determining wheth ..read more