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[Robert Solovay <solovay AT gmail.com>]

I'd like to see the rest of your letter.

-- Bob Solovay

On Oct 26, 2016 7:15 PM, "Robert Merkin" <bobmerk AT earthlink.net> wrote:

Sincerely sorry for prematurely pressing the wrong [reply] button re the John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award committee.

 

I have since finished the letter and sent it privately to Professor Susan Eisenbach.

 

But if any member wishes to see the rest of my odd e-mail, happy to oblige, request off-List.

Bob Merkin
west a few miles from Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts USA

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Robert Merkin

To: coq-club AT inria.fr

Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2016 5:20 PM

Subject: Re: [Coq-Club] John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award

Dear Susan and Award colleagues,

 

I apologize sincerely for failing, but I never quite nailed a B.S. (I do have High School Graduate documentation and would be pleased to send photocopies.)

 

I have been expelled from many of the finest universities in the United Stares. After my honorable service in the military while under wartime conscription, I used my veteran's benefits to do some electrical engineering, calculus, and Ancient Digital Computing.

 

The calculus made my brain bleed, it was the first college class I had to wake up at 4 a.m. and go to sleep at 2 a.m. just to pull a C, a D now and then. 

 

In my  first  university, documentation exists proving I took, from the Department of Philosophy, Symbolic Logic (Copi, 5th edition).

 

I am old and have trouble with very-long-term memory, but I think I Aced it. (Now I suspect the professor was grading on the curve, or  grateful for my always being there awake; many fellow scholars had already fled.) We had another text, a typescript introduction to Boolean Algebra, with strange crude diagrams. Copi took me to some understanding and all the symbology of the leading edge of symbolic logic at that time, circa 1967, up to and including the Church-Kleane Lambda Calculus and related systems and concepts.

 

I fell in with bad companions (newspaper journalists and novelists) and lost touch with symbolic logic.

 

Imagine my surprise when I awoke and saw its recent explosive developments and industrial and scholarly activity and importance, from my Knuth-era discovery of QuickSort. I joined Coq-club and so saw your invitation.

 

I have been obsessed with computers ever since circa 1967, for many decades. For my first kit computer, I was forced to learn Machine Language (not Assembly) to program the expensive machine in the bedroom off the front panel switches.*

 

I am a Visiting Fellow of an Australian university society for Informal Wine and Science Afternoon Lectures, bestowed on me for strange but successful computer solutions to strange things.

 

Technically, I am an Overclocker, details on request. Familiarity with Dutch not required, but helpful.

 

Mathematically, I experiment with Very Large Integers via Brute Force computation. I use large computers to find answers to things most do not yet perceive as questions. I am just one of thousands of such amateur boffins worldwide.

 

At present our home computers are assisting (by distributed networking) in solving the transformation of 2D DNA information chains into 3D proteins, the chemically functional targets, usually by shape catalysis, of DNA. The buzzword is "Folding @ Home," geographically headquartered at Stanford University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* bedroom computer in movie "War Games," I built and programmed that one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: <Jeremy.Gibbons AT cs.ox.ac.uk>

To: <coq-club AT inria.fr>

Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2016 2:27 PM

Subject: [Coq-Club] John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award

> Dear all,
>
> If this year one of your PhD students has graduated and the thesis was outstanding, please consider proposing it for the John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award. See http://www.sigplan.org/Awards/Dissertation/ for details.
>
> Best wishes,
> Susan
> --
> Professor Susan Eisenbach
> Department of Computing
> Imperial College London
> London SW7 2AZ, U.K.