- Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) has always played a key role in any history of science, as well as many histories of philosophy. He is a—if not the—central figure of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. His work in physics (or “natural philosophy”), astronomy, and the methodology of science still evoke debate after more than 400 years. His role in promoting the Copernican theory and his travails and trials with the Roman Church are stories that still require re-telling. This article attempts to provide an overview of these aspects of Galileo’s life and work, but does so by focusing in a new way on his arguments concerning the nature of matter.
- How did Dennis Ritchie Produce his PhD Thesis? A Typographical Mystery (fermatslibrary.com)
Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and, with Ken Thompson, the co-creator of the Unix operating system, completed his Harvard PhD thesis on recursive function theory in early 1968. But for unknown reasons, he never officially received his degree, and the thesis itself disappeared for nearly 50 years. This strange set of circumstances raises at least three broad questions…
stanford encyclopedia of philosophy of