HANK WAN MEMORIAL LECTURE: Neal Stephenson

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Catherine Copetas <copetas+ () cs cmu edu>
Reply-To: Catherine Copetas <copetas+ () cs cmu edu>
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 17:13:03 -0400
To: scs-all () cs cmu edu
Subject: HANK WAN MEMORIAL LECTURE: Neal Stephenson



Please join us for....

THE HANK SUZ-CHI WAN MEMORIAL LECTURE
A School of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture
**************************************************
   Thursday, 1 May 2003
   4:15 PM - Distinguished Donuts - Outside the Auditorium
   4:30 PM - McConomy Auditorium, University Center
             (Lecture will be broadcast over CMTv)

 NEAL STEPHENSON
 Writer and Science Fiction Author


 "WORK IN PROGRESS"


 BACKGROUND
 **********
 Maryland--home of the National Security Agency--Stephenson comes
 from a long line of what he calls "propeller heads." His father is
 a professor of electrical engineering whose father was a physics
 professor. His mother worked in a biochemistry lab and her
 father was a biochemistry professor. Author of the cyberpunk
 classic Snow Crash, the Hugo Award-winning The Diamond Age, and
 Zodiac: The Eco Thriller, Neal Stephenson has written for Wired
 and is one of three authors ever to write a fiction piece for
 Time magazine. Avon Books Trade Paperbacks recently published
 essay on operating systems, In the Beginning... was the Command Line,
 which The Washington Post called "a new generation's Zen and the
 Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."

 Stephenson has been praised for having an almost prophetic vision
 of the future, and as a respected thinker in this area, is one of
 six visiting fellows at Ernst & Young's Center for Business
 Innovation in Cambridge Massachusetts. Stephenson admits that he
 runs into people who tell him there are companies in Silicon Valley
 who are basically throwing his novel Snow Crash on the table and
 saying "this is our business plan." MIT Media Lab Professor Michael
 Hawley says, "what Arthur C. Clarke was to a previous generation,
 Neal Stephenson is to ours. Neal is the kind of genius who puts
 one jarring idea on every page."

 Growing up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois and Ames, Iowa,
 Stephenson decided he never wanted to work in an occupation that
 forced him to wear hard shoes. He began college as physics major
 at Boston University but later entered the geography department
 because "they were using the coolest computers." A capable
 programmer and acclaimed writer, he finds it hard to work unless
 he's listening to music on headphones.

 Since 1984, he has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and has
 made a living out of writing novels and the occasional magazine
 article. He lives in the Seattle area with his family where he is
 writing his next novel, Quicksilver, with a fountain pen. It is part
 of a series of historical novels entitled The Baroque Cycle, which
 will begin publication in October with the first volume, Quicksilver.




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