Rodney Brooks (born December 30, 1954, in Adelaide, Australia) has had an impact on robotics and AI matched by few. And there is probably no one who’s had a bigger impact on viable commercial robotics. In the 1970s, when everybody else was obsessed with complex AI-driven, map-building robots, Brooks shocked the AI community by creating […]
Stewart Brand changed my life. Several times. When I was 16 years old, I got a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog and I was never the same. Through it, I discovered Buckminster Fuller, Gregory Bateson, whole systems thinking, nomadics, and the general, revolutionary notion (now commonplace in our wired info-age) that an individual could […]
Most people probably think of William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) as a slightly whack-a-doodle British poet and painter. But he was so much more than that. He was a slightly whack-a-doodle British craftsman, inventor, engraver, printer, and self-publisher, among many other things. Blake believed that every human being had a “poetic […]
Today marks the first anniversary of the birth of Polish-born, Franco-American mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot since his death on October 14. Mandelbrot worked in a variety of mathematical disciplines, but is best known as the “Father of Fractal Geometry.” He was well eulogized by the New York Times, and, more personally, by Rudy Rucker. Today he would’ve been 86.
Born in Brooklyn on this date in 1934, galactic citizen Carl Sagan—scientist, educator, advocate, author, artist, interstellar diplomat—passed away in 1996. Today he would have been 76.
Steve posing with his Winnebiko II in the late 80s A big Maker Birthday shout-out to our friend, MAKE contributor, and DIY superhero Steve Roberts. Steve has been artfully hacking the physical world in creative, innovative, and inspiring ways for decades. Throughout the 80s, he biked across America, in his tricked-out recumbent, computerized bikes and […]
It’s a great honor for me to be able to use this Maker Birthdays forum to offer up an entry-day shout-out to one of my favorite living makers, Jeri Ellsworth. If ever there was someone for whom the fire for making appears to have been blazing since birth, it’s Jeri. She seems to live for […]
