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Hi Steve
There were many people my father spoke highly of, over the years.
Some were people he worked with, others were people he learned from who were
dead before he ever had a chance to meet them. He respected people like DaVinci
and JS Bach enormously, for example, as he did Einstein, whereas people like
Freud or Monod were barely worth the effort it would take to ridicule them.
The list of names of people whose work my father respected would be
impossibly long and it might be better to know whether you are looking for
"influences" or for friends... Without knowing that, I can only give fairly
general information.
Aside from Einstein, whose commitment to the power of rational
thought and personal integrity my father admired; Rashevsky, whose courage to
admit he had gotten it wrong initially and the willingness to change course and
follow the problem where it led (as well as the intelligence and insight it took
to recognize all of that); and Robert Hutchins, who was a relentless and
voracious learner in all things and who taught my father that there was
value in listening to the ideas of people in very (seemingly) disparate areas of
thought (the fact that social science could provide insights into problems in
biology, for example, astonished my father but also led to the breakthrough that
became Anticipatory Systems and which took him farther into developing
his Complexity Theory)... there are plenty of people whose work he
respected, like Cantor or Prigogine, and plenty more he considered a
personal friend, such as Otto Rossler. There were even some, like Jonas Salk,
who straddled both those sets.
When I get the inventory done of my father's reference library, I
will be posting it on my website and that will provide one window into whose
work he felt it necessary to own. Mind you, that doesn't mean he respected all
those people. Sometimes, it's important to know and have reference to the
work of those you feel are dead wrong in their thought process.
You might be surprised at the kind of books or other works he
collected. "The Devil's Dictionary" by Ambrose Bierce and "Fables for Our Times"
by James Thurber. He loved Gilbert and Sullivan operettas every bit as much as
the musical comedy of Victor Borge or the music of Brahms... He had every
single book of the Peanuts cartoons. He loved the old horror films with Boris
Karloff or Bela Lugosi (where he said to me; "The mob is the real monster
here.") as well as all Danny Kaye films. And he was a fan of good shows on
television; an original Trekkie, All In The Family, Barney Miller, Taxi, Monty
Python and Fawlty Towers, Mission Impossible, The Avengers, and Hawaii 5-O,
among others. One of the books he recommended to me was "The Fountainhead" by
Ayn Rand, although he and I agreed that she went downhill after writing that
book. "The Fountainhead" has a character named Howard Ruark in it, who
reminded me a lot of my father in his motivations, although not in personality.
Anyway, if this is not the kind of thing you were interested in,
let me know. I'll do what I can to provide you with a list that's
helpful.
Judith
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