Clifford Alan Pickover (born August 15, 1957) is an American author, editor, and columnist in the fields of

science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence ...

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel uni ...

innovation Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services. ISO TC 279 in the standard ISO 56000:2020 defines innovation as "a new or changed enti ...

, and

creativity Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is formed. The created item may be intangible (such as an idea, a scientific theory, a musical composition, or a joke) or a physical object (such as an invention, a printed lit ...

. For many years, he was employed at the IBM

Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. The center comprises three sites, with its main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, U.S., 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City, Albany, New York and wit ...

Yorktown, New York Yorktown is a town on the northern border of Westchester County, New York, United States. A suburb of the New York City metropolitan area, it is approximately north of midtown Manhattan. The population was 36,569 at the 2020 U.S. Census. Histo ...

where he was Editor-in-Chief of the '' IBM Journal of Research and Development''. He has been granted more than 700 U.S. patents, is an elected Fellow for the

Committee for Skeptical Inquiry The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), formerly known as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), is a program within the US non-profit organization Center for Inquiry (CFI), which seeks to "pro ...

, and is author of more than 50 books, translated into more than a dozen languages. Pickover.com

Biography

Pickover was elected as a Fellow for the

for his “significant contributions to the general public’s understanding of science, reason, and critical inquiry through their scholarship, writing, and work in the media.” Other Fellows have included

Carl Sagan Carl Edward Sagan (; ; November 9, 1934December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on ex ...

and

Isaac Asimov yi, יצחק אזימאװ , birth_date = , birth_place = Petrovichi, Russian SFSR , spouse = , relatives = , children = 2 , death_date = , death_place = Manhattan, New York City, U.S. , nationality = Russian (1920–1922)Soviet (192 ...

. He has been awarded almost 700 United States patents, and his '' The Math Book'' was winner of the 2011 Neumann Prize. He received his

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * '' Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. al ...

in 1982 from

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the w ...

's Department of

Molecular Biophysics Molecular biophysics is a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary area of research that combines concepts in physics, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and biology. It seeks to understand biomolecular systems and explain biological function in term ...

and

Biochemistry Biochemistry or biological chemistry is the study of chemical processes within and relating to living organisms. A sub-discipline of both chemistry and biology, biochemistry may be divided into three fields: structural biology, enzymology and ...

, where he conducted research on

X-ray An X-ray, or, much less commonly, X-radiation, is a penetrating form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation. Most X-rays have a wavelength ranging from 10 picometers to 10 nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30&nb ...

scattering and protein structure. Pickover graduated first in his class from

Franklin and Marshall College Franklin & Marshall College (F&M) is a private liberal arts college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It employs 175 full-time faculty members and has a student body of approximately 2,400 full-time students. It was founded upon the merger of Frankli ...

, after completing the four-year undergraduate program in three years.Clifford A. Pickover – Biographical Sketch
Retrieved July 8, 2008. He joined IBM at the

in 1982, as a member of the

speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal langua ...

group and later worked on the design-automation workstations. For much of his career, Pickover has published technical articles in the areas of scientific visualization,

computer art Computer art is any art in which computers play a role in production or display of the artwork. Such art can be an image, sound, animation, video, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, video game, website, algorithm, performance or gallery installation. Many tradit ...

, and

recreational mathematics Recreational mathematics is mathematics carried out for recreation (entertainment) rather than as a strictly research and application-based professional activity or as a part of a student's formal education. Although it is not necessarily limited ...

. He is currently an associate editor for the scientific journal ''

Computers and Graphics ''Computers & Graphics'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that covers computer graphics and related subjects such as data visualization, human-computer interaction, virtual reality, and augmented reality. It was established in 1975 and orig ...

'' and is an editorial board member for ''Odyssey'' and ''Leonardo''. He is also the Brain-Strain columnist for ''Odyssey'' magazine, and, for many years, he was the Brain-Boggler columnist for ''Discover'' magazine. Pickover has received more than 100 IBM invention achievement awards, three research division awards, and four external honor awards.

Work

Pickover's primary interest is in finding new ways to expand creativity by melding art, science, mathematics, and other seemingly disparate areas of human endeavor. In ''The Math Book'' and his companion book ''The Physics Book'', Pickover explains that both mathematics and physics "cultivate a perpetual state of wonder about the limits of thoughts, the workings of the universe, and our place in the vast space-time landscape that we call home." Pickover is an inventor with over 700

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...

s, the author of puzzle calendars, and puzzle contributor to magazines geared to children and adults. His Neoreality and Heaven Virus science-fiction series explores the fabric of reality and religion. Pickover is author of hundreds of technical papers in diverse fields, ranging from the creative visualizations of fossil seashells, genetic sequences, cardiac and speech sounds, and virtual caverns and

lava lamps A lava lamp is a decorative lamp, invented in 1963 by British entrepreneur Edward Craven Walker, the founder of the lighting company Mathmos. It consists of a bolus of a special coloured wax mixture inside a glass vessel, the remainder of which ...

, to fractal and mathematically based studies. He also has published articles in the areas of skepticism (e.g. ESP and Nostradamus), psychology (e.g. temporal lobe epilepsy and genius), and technical speculation (e.g. “What if scientists had found a computer in 1900?” and “An informal survey on the scientific and social impact of a soda can-sized super-super computer”). Additional visualization work includes topics that involve breathing motions of proteins, snow-flake like patterns for speech sounds, cartoon-face representations of data, and biomorphs. Pickover has also written extensively on the reported experiences of people on the psychotropic compound

DMT ''N'',''N''-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT or ''N'',''N''-DMT, SPL026) is a substituted tryptamine that occurs in many plants and animals, including human beings, and which is both a derivative and a structural analog of tryptamine. It is used as a ...

. Such apparent entities as

Machine Elves ''N'',''N''-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT or ''N'',''N''-DMT, SPL026) is a substituted tryptamine that occurs in many plants and animals, including human beings, and which is both a derivative and a structural analog of tryptamine. It is used as ...

are described as well as "Insects From A Parallel Universe". On November 4, 2006, he began Wikidumper.org, a popular blog featuring articles being considered for deletion by

English Wikipedia The English Wikipedia is, along with the Simple English Wikipedia, one of two English-language editions of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was founded on January 15, 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition, and, as of , has the most arti ...

Pickover stalks

Pickover stalks are certain kinds of details that are empirically found in the

Mandelbrot set The Mandelbrot set () is the set of complex numbers c for which the function f_c(z)=z^2+c does not diverge to infinity when iterated from z=0, i.e., for which the sequence f_c(0), f_c(f_c(0)), etc., remains bounded in absolute value. This ...

in the study of

fractal geometry In mathematics, a fractal is a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension. Many fractals appear similar at various scales, as illu ...

. In the 1980s, Pickover proposed that experimental mathematicians and computer artists examine the behavior of orbit trajectories for the Mandelbrot set in order to study how closely the orbits of interior points come to the x and y axes in the complex plane. In some renditions of this behavior, the closer that the point approaches, the higher up the color scale, with red denoting the closest approach. The logarithm of the distance is taken to accentuate the details. This work grew from his earlier work with Julia sets and "Pickover biomorphs," the latter of which often resembled microbes.Linas Vepstas (1997)
"Interior Sketchbook Diary"
Retrieved July 8, 2008.

Frontiers of Scientific Visualization

In "Frontiers of Scientific Visualization" (1994) Pickover explored "the art and science of making the unseen workings of nature visible". The books contains contributions on "Fluid flow, fractals, plant growth, genetic sequencing, the configuration of distant galaxies, virtual reality to artistic inspiration", and focuses on use of computers as tools for simulation, art and discovery.

Visualizing Biological Information

In "Visualizing Biological Information" (1995) Pickover considered "biological data of all kinds, which is proliferating at an incredible rate". According to Pickover, "if humans attempt to read such data in the form of numbers and letters, they will take in the information at a snail's pace. If the information is rendered graphically, however, human analysts can assimilate it and gain insight much faster. The emphasis of this work is on the novel graphical and musical representation of information containing sequences, such as DNA and amino acid sequences, to help us find hidden pattern and meaning".

Vampire numbers and other mathematical highlights

In mathematics, a

vampire number In number theory, a vampire number (or true vampire number) is a composite natural number with an even number of digits, that can be factored into two natural numbers each with half as many digits as the original number, where the two factors cont ...

or ''true vampire number'' is a

composite Composite or compositing may refer to: Materials * Composite material, a material that is made from several different substances ** Metal matrix composite, composed of metal and other parts ** Cermet, a composite of ceramic and metallic materials ...

natural number In mathematics, the natural numbers are those numbers used for counting (as in "there are ''six'' coins on the table") and ordering (as in "this is the ''third'' largest city in the country"). Numbers used for counting are called '' cardinal ...

''v'', with an even number of digits ''n'', that can be factored into two

integers An integer is the number zero (), a positive natural number (, , , etc.) or a negative integer with a minus sign ( −1, −2, −3, etc.). The negative numbers are the additive inverses of the corresponding positive numbers. In the language ...

''x'' and ''y'' each with ''n''/2 digits and not both with trailing zeroes, where ''v'' contains all the digits from ''x'' and from ''y'', in any order. ''x'' and ''y'' are called the ''fangs''. As an example, 1260 is a vampire number because it can be expressed as 21 × 60 = 1260. Note that the digits of the factors 21 and 60 can be found, in some scrambled order, in 1260. Similarly, 136,948 is a vampire because 136,948 = 146 × 938. Vampire numbers first appeared in a 1994 post by Clifford A. Pickover to the

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it wa ...

group sci.math, and the article he later wrote was published in chapter 30 of his book ''Keys to Infinity''. In addition to “Vampire numbers”, a term Pickover actually coined, he has coined the following terms in the area of mathematics: Leviathan number, factorion, Carotid–Kundalini function and fractal, batrachion,

Juggler sequence In number theory, a juggler sequence is an integer sequence that starts with a positive integer ''a''0, with each subsequent term in the sequence defined by the recurrence relation: a_= \begin \left \lfloor a_k^ \right \rfloor, & \text a_k \text ...

, and Legion's number, among others. For characterizing noisy data, he has used

Truchet tiles In information visualization and graphic design, Truchet tiles are square tiles decorated with patterns that are not rotationally symmetric. When placed in a square tiling of the plane, they can form varied patterns, and the orientation of each til ...

and Noise spheres, the later of which is a term he coined for a particular mapping, and visualization, of noisy data to spherical coordinates. In 1990, he asked “Is There a Double Smoothly Undulating Integer?”, and he computed “All Known Replicating Fibonacci Digits Less than One Billion". With his colleague John R. Hendricks, he was the first to compute the smallest perfect (nasik) magic tesseract. The “Pickover sequence” dealing with e and pi was named after him, as was the “Cliff random number generator” and the Pickover attractor, sometimes also referred to as the Clifford Attractor.

Culture, religion, belief

Starting in about 2001, Pickover's books sometimes began to include topics beyond his traditional focus on science and mathematics. For example, ''Dreaming the Future'' discusses various methods of divination that humans have used since stone-age times. ''The Paradox of God'' deals with topics in religion. Perhaps the most obvious departure from his earlier works includes ''Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves: Sushi, Psychedelics, Parallel Universes, and the Quest for Transcendence'', which explores the “borderlands of science” and is “part memoir and part surrealist perspective on culture.”. Pickover follows-up his “quest for transcendence” and examination of popular culture with ''A Beginner’s Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection''.

History of science and mathematics

Starting in 2008, Pickover's books began to focus on the history of science and mathematics, with such titles as '' Archimedes to Hawking'', as well as '' The Math Book'', '' The Physics Book'', and '' The Medical Book''—a trilogy of more than 1,500 pages that presents various historical milestones, breakthroughs, and curiosities.

WikiDumper.org

Wikidumper.org is a website created by Pickover that promises to permanently record a snapshot of the "best of the English Wikipedia rejects", articles that are slated for deletion at the English Wikipedia. WikiDumper was launched on November 4, 2006, and accepts user submissions. Although the site doesn't specify its criteria for inclusion, many of its articles don't

cite A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose o ...

their sources. The site has been criticized as likely to be less accurate than English Wikipedia.

Publications

Pickover is author of over forty books on such topics as computers and

art Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...

black hole A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light or other electromagnetic waves, has enough energy to escape it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can def ...

s, human behavior and intelligence,

time travel Time travel is the concept of movement between certain points in time, analogous to movement between different points in space by an object or a person, typically with the use of a hypothetical device known as a time machine. Time travel is a ...

alien life Extraterrestrial life, colloquially referred to as alien life, is life that may occur outside Earth and which did not originate on Earth. No extraterrestrial life has yet been conclusively detected, although efforts are underway. Such life might ...

Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theor ...

religion Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatur ...

dimethyltryptamine ''N'',''N''-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT or ''N'',''N''-DMT, SPL026) is a substituted tryptamine that occurs in many plants and animals, including human beings, and which is both a derivative and a structural analog of tryptamine. It is used as a ...

elves, parallel universes, the nature of

genius Genius is a characteristic of original and exceptional insight in the performance of some art or endeavor that surpasses expectations, sets new standards for future works, establishes better methods of operation, or remains outside the capabili ...

, and

.His books have been translated into French,

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

, Italian, German,

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...

, Chinese,

Korean Korean may refer to: People and culture * Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula * Korean cuisine * Korean culture * Korean language **Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl **Korean dialects and the Jeju language ** ...

, Polish, Spanish and Turkish.

Books

* 1990. ''Computers, Pattern, Chaos, and Beauty''. St. Martin's Press. * 1991. ''Computers and the Imagination''. St. Martin's Press. * 1992. ''Mazes for the Mind''. St. Martin's Press. * 1994. ''Chaos in Wonderland''. St. Martin's Press. * 1995. ''Keys to Infinity''. Wiley. * 1996. ''Black Holes: A Traveler's Guide''. Wiley. * 1997. ''The Alien IQ Test''. Basic Books. * 1997. ''The Loom of God''. Plenum. * 1998. ''Spider Legs''. With

Piers Anthony Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob (born 6 August 1934) is an American author in the science fiction and Fantasy (genre), fantasy genres, publishing under the name Piers Anthony. He is best known for his :Xanth books, long-running novel series set in ...

TOR. * 1998. ''The Science of Aliens''. Basic Books. * 1998. ''Time: A Traveler's Guide''. Oxford University Press. * 1999. ''Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen'', Harper Perennial/Quill, * 1999. ''Surfing Through Hyperspace''. Oxford University Press. * 2000. ''Cryptorunes: Codes and Secret Writing''. Pomegranate. * 2000. ''The Girl Who Gave Birth to Rabbits''. Prometheus. * 2000. ''Wonders of Numbers''. Oxford University Press. * 2001. ''Dreaming the Future''. Prometheus. * 2001. ''The Stars of Heaven''. Oxford University Press. * 2002. ''The Zen of Magic Squares, Circles, and Stars''. Princeton University Press. * 2002. ''The Mathematics of Oz''. Cambridge University Press. * 2002. ''The Paradox of God and the Science of Omniscience''. St. Martin's Press. * 2003. ''Calculus and Pizza''. John Wiley & Sons. * 2005. ''Sex, Drugs, Einstein, and Elves''. Smart Publications. * 2005. ''A Passion for Mathematics'', John Wiley & Sons. * 2006. ''The Mobius Strip'', Thunder's Mouth Press. * 2007. ''A Beginner's Guide to Immortality''. Thunder's Mouth Press. * 2007. ''The Heaven Virus''. Lulu. * 2008. ''Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them''. Oxford University Press. * 2009. ''Jews in Hyperspace''. Kindle Edition. * 2009. ''The Loom of God''. Sterling Publishing. * 2009. '' The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematics''. Sterling Publishing. * 2011. ''The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection''. Sterling Publishing. * 2012. ''The Medical Book: From Witch Doctors to Robot Surgeons''. Sterling Publishing. * 2012. ''Brain Strain: A Mental Muscle Workout That's Fun!''. Cricket Media. * 2013. ''The Book of Black: Black Holes, Black Death, Black Forest Cake and Other Dark Sides of Life'', Calla Editions. * 2014. ''The Mathematics Devotional: Celebrating the Wisdom and Beauty of Mathematics''. Sterling Publishing. . * 2015. ''The Physics Devotional: Celebrating the Wisdom and Beauty of Physics''. Sterling Publishing . * 2015. ''Death and the Afterlife: A Chronological Journey, from Cremation to Quantum Resurrection''. Sterling Publishing. * 2018. ''The Science Book: From Darwin to Dark Energy''. Sterling Publishing. * 2019. ''Artificial Intelligence: An Illustrated History, From Medieval Robots to Neural Networks''. Sterling Publishing. * ''Mind-Bending Puzzles'' (calendars & cards), Pomegranate, each year

Neoreality science fiction series

* 2002. ''Liquid Earth''. The Lighthouse Press, Inc. * 2002. ''The Lobotomy Club''. The Lighthouse Press, Inc. * 2002. ''Sushi Never Sleeps''. The Lighthouse Press, Inc. * 2002. ''Egg Drop Soup''. The Lighthouse Press, Inc.

Edited collections

* 1992. ''Spiral Symmetry'', World Scientific. * 1993. ''Visions of the Future'': St. Martin's Press. * 1994. ''Frontiers of Scientific Visualization''. Wiley. * 1995. ''Future Health: Computers & Medicine in the 21st Century''. St. Martin's Press. * 1995. 'The Pattern Book: Fractals, Art, and Nature''. World Scientific. * 1995. ''Visualizing Biological Information''. World Scientific. * 1996. ''Fractal Horizons''. St. Martin's Press, * 1998. ''Chaos and Fractals''. Elsevier.

References

External links

Personal website
a blog which regularly posts his links of interest
Radio Interview
from

This Week in Science Kirsten "Kiki" Sanford is an American neurophysiologist and science communicator. After working at the University of California, Davis as a research scientist, she left research work to pursue a career in science communication. Her work has in ...

July 11, 2006 broadcast
The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump (WikiDumper.org)
Pickover's blog regarding English Wikipedia's articles slated for deletion * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Pickover, Clifford A. 1957 births Living people 20th-century American non-fiction writers 21st-century American non-fiction writers American science writers American science fiction writers American columnists American skeptics Franklin & Marshall College alumni IBM employees Information visualization experts Mathematics writers Mathematics popularizers Recreational cryptographers Novelists from New York (state) Yale University alumni Academic journal editors American male novelists 20th-century American male writers American male non-fiction writers 21st-century American male writers Discover (magazine) people

Biography

Work

Pickover stalks

Frontiers of Scientific Visualization

Visualizing Biological Information

Vampire numbers and other mathematical highlights

Culture, religion, belief

History of science and mathematics

WikiDumper.org

Publications

Books

Neoreality science fiction series

Edited collections

See also

References

External links