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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, and a notable proponent of intelligent design, author of numerous articles on the topic.

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.

He has authored works on systems analysis, differential topology, theoretical biology, analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics. 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). Another book, The Secrets of the Vaulted Sky (2003), is a sympathetic treatment of astrology.

He is the author of several 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 evolution, Berlinski is a Fellow of the Discovery Institutes's Center for Science and Culture, a Seattle-based think-thank that is hub of the intelligent design movement. The scientific community, however, regards intelligent design as pseudoscience. And the ruling in the 2005 Drover trial held that intelligent design is a form of creationism and that the intelligent design movement is a political rather than scientific movement.

Though the Discovery Institute portrays Berlinski as a scholarly writer and "mathematician," Mark Perakh, a critic of the intelligent design movement, contends that Berlinski's writings are not scientific, but popular, and that Berlinski "has no known record of his own contribution to the development of mathematics or of any other science."

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. Approximately one-third of the book is devoted to polemical attacks on evolution, which Coulter, as Berlinski often does, terms "Darwinism."

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."

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. National Science Teachers Association, a professional association of 55,000 science teachers and administrators in a 2005 press release: "We stand with the nation's leading scientific organizations and scientists, including Dr. John Marburger, the president's top science advisor, in stating that intelligent design is not science.…It is simply not fair to present pseudoscience to students in the science classroom." National Science Teachers Association Disappointed About Intelligent Design Comments Made by President Bush National Science Teachers Association Press Release August 3 2005
  4. Ruling, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.
  5. "Paris-based writer David Berlinski, a mathematician and microbiologist skeptical of both Darwinism and ID." "David Berlinski, a mathematician with post-doctoral training in molecular biology. (Berlinksi’s scholarly article in the February issue of Commentary will prove an unpleasant read for evolutionists.)"
  6. "The main proponents of Intelligent Design, however, while being very active and loud in asserting their anti-evolution views, have so far produced no genuine scientific results related to their ID theory. Most of them, with a few exceptions, have produced very little of anything scientific in general. For example, David Berlinski, usually referred to as a mathematician, has authored popular books on mathematics, and papers against evolution, but has no known record of his own contribution to the development of mathematics or of any other science." Scientists Respond to the Orchestrated Assault of IDists on Professor Gross Mark Perakh. Science Insights, a publication of the National Association of Scholars, September 2003
  7. 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."
  8. 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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