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David Berlinski

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David Berlinski (born 1942 in New York City) is an educator and author of popular books on mathematics, notable critic of the Darwinian explanation for evolution, and author of numerous articles in favor of intelligent design.

Biography

Career

David Berlinski received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University, and was later a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University. He has taught philosophy, mathematics, and English at Stanford, Rutgers, the City University of New York, the University of Washington, the University of Puget Sound, San Jose State University, the University of Santa Clara, the University of San Francisco, and San Francisco State University.

He has also taught mathematics at the Université de Paris. He has been a research fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria and the Institute des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France. He currently lives in Paris.

Early in his career, he worked for the elite management consulting company, McKinsey & Company, as an associate (a junior consultant) at the firm's New York City headquarters. Harvey Golub, later CEO and Chairman of the Board of American Express, and Lou Gerstner, later CEO and Chairman of IBM were young McKinsey associates at the same time.

Berlinski is best known as the author of several books on mathematics and the history of mathematics written for the general public. These include A Tour of the Calculus (1997) on calculus, The Advent of the Algorithm (2000) on algorithms, Newton's Gift (2000) on Isaac Newton, and Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics (2005).

He is author of detective novels starring private investigator Aaron Asherfeld: Less Than Meets the Eye, The Body Shop and A Clean Sweep, and a number of shorter works of fiction and non-fiction.

Intelligent Design

An outspoken critic of Darwinism, Berlinski is a Fellow of the Discovery Institutes's Center for Science and Culture, a Seattle-based think-thank that is a strong promoter of the intelligent design movement. Being a self described agnostic Jew, he states that he is an obvious example of why the intelligent design is not a movement of Christian creationists.

In his June 1996 article in Commentary entitled "The Deniable Darwin", Berlinski stated:

The fundamental core of Darwinian doctrine, the philosopher Daniel Dennett has buoyantly affirmed, "is no longer in dispute among scientists." Such is the party line, useful on those occasions when biologists must present a single face to their public. But it was to the dead that Darwin pointed for confirmation of his theory; the fact that paleontology does not entirely support his doctrine has been a secret of long standing among paleontologists. "The known fossil record," Steven Stanley observes, "fails to document a single example of phyletic evolution accomplishing a major morphologic transition and hence offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid."

Berlinski, along with fellow Discovery Institute associates Michael Behe and William A. Dembski, "tutored" Ann Coulter on science and evolution for her book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. A large section of this popular book is devoted to polemical attacks on the Darwinian theory for evolution.

Berlinski was a longtime friend of the late Marcel-Paul Schützenberger (1920-1996), with whom he collaborated on an unfinished and unpublished mathematical polemic which he described as being "devoted to the Darwinian theory of evolution."

He has authored works on systems analysis, differential topology, theoretical biology, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics.

Writings (partial list)

Books

  • The Advent of the Algorithm: The 300-Year Journey from an Idea to the Computer, 2001, ISBN 0-15-601391-6
  • Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics, 2005, ISBN 0-679-64234-X
  • Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World, 2000, ISBN 0-684-84392-7
  • The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky: Astrology and the Art of Prediction, 2003, ISBN 0-15-100527-3
  • A Tour of the Calculus, 1996, ISBN 0-679-42645-0
  • Black Mischief, 1986, ISBN 0-688-04404-2

Articles

References

  1. Discovery Institute article database for David Berlinski
  2. Berlinksi, David, The Well-tempered Wittgenstein, Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1968.
  3. The Deniable Darwin David Berlinski. Commentary 101, Number 6, June 1 1996.
  4. Coulter, Ann, Godless: The Church of Liberalism. From the book jacket: "I couldn't have written about evolution without the generous tutoring of Michael Behe, David Berlinski, and William Dembski, all of whom are fabulous at translating complex ideas, unlike liberal arts types, who constantly force me to the dictionary to relearn the meaning of quotidian."
  5. Wilf, Herbert et al., "In Memoriam: Marcel-Paul Schützenberger, 1920-1996," Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, served from University of Pennsylvania Dept. of Mathematics Server, article dated 12 October 1996, retrieved from WWW on 4 November 2006.

External links

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