JEWISH COMPUTER & INFORMATION SCIENTISTS

JINFO.ORG

 SHORT LIST
  • Leonard Adleman
  • Paul Baran
  • Richard Bellman
  • Yoshua Bengio
  • Manuel Blum
  • Georg Cantor 2
  • Vinton Cerf 3
  • Noam Chomsky
  • George Dantzig
  • Martin Davis
  • Peter Elias
  • Paul Erdös
  • Robert Fano
  • Edward Feigenbaum
  • Edward Fredkin
  • William Friedman
  • Shafi Goldwasser
  • Solomon Golomb
  • Stephen Grossberg
  • Martin Hellman
  • Amos Joel, Jr.
  • William Kahan
  • Robert Kahn
  • Richard Karp
  • John Kemeny
  • Jon Kleinberg
  • Leonard Kleinrock
  • Raymond Kurzweil
  • Leslie Lamport
  • Rolf Landauer
  • Abraham Lempel
  • Leonid Levin
  • Barbara Liskov
  • John McCarthy 4
  • Marvin Minsky
  • Joel Moses
  • John von Neumann
  • Max Newman 5
  • Seymour Papert
  • Judea Pearl
  • Mark Pinsker
  • Emil Post
  • Hilary Putnam
  • Michael Rabin
  • Alfréd Rényi
  • Frank Rosenblatt
  • Adi Shamir
  • Herbert Simon 8
  • Gustave Solomon
  • Daniel Spielman
  • Peter Swerling
  • Leo Szilard
  • Robert Tarjan 10
  • Alfred Tarski
  • Stanislaw Ulam
  • Leslie Valiant
  • Vladimir Vapnik
  • Andrew Viterbi
  • Abraham Wald
  • Norbert Wiener
  • Avi Wigderson
  • Jacob Wolfowitz
  • Stephen Wolfram
  • Lotfi Zadeh 12
  • Jacob Ziv
 LONG LIST
  • Harold Abelson
  • Samson Abramsky
  • Norman Abramson
  • Leonard Adleman
  • Dorit Aharonov
  • Berni Alder
  • Noga Alon
  • Saul Amarel
  • Kenneth Appel
  • Michael Arbib
  • Paul Baran
  • Yehoshua Bar-Hillel
  • Richard Bellman 1
  • Yoshua Bengio
  • Paul Benioff
  • Michael Ben-Or
  • Evelyn Berezin
  • Bonnie Berger
  • Marsha Berger
  • Toby Berger
  • Hans Berliner
  • Eli Biham
  • Max Black
  • Avrim Blum
  • Lenore Blum
  • Manuel Blum
  • Robert Blumofe
  • Corrado Bohm
  • Dan Boneh
  • Allan Borodin
  • Zvika Brakerski
  • Mark Braverman
  • Dan Bricklin
  • Sergey Brin
  • Andrei Broder
  • Julian Bussgang
  • Georg Cantor 2
  • Vinton Cerf 3
  • Gregory Chaitin
  • Jule Charney
  • David Chaum
  • Alexey Chervonenkis
  • Noam Chomsky
  • Alexandre Chorin
  • Richard Courant
  • George B. Dantzig
  • Edward E. David
  • Martin Davis
  • David Deutsch
  • Yefim Dinitz
  • Irit Dinur
  • Roland Dobrushin
  • Hubert Dreyfus
  • Stuart Dreyfus
  • Cynthia Dwork
  • Samuel Eilenberg
  • Peter Elias
  • Joel Engel
  • Carl Engelman
  • Paul Erdös
  • Ronald Fagin
  • Adin Falkoff
  • Robert Fano
  • Solomon Feferman
  • Uriel Feige
  • Edward Feigenbaum
  • Amiel Feinstein
  • Richard Feynman
  • Lawrence Fogel
  • Lance Fortnow
  • Matthew Franklin
  • Robert Frankston
  • Edward Fredkin
  • Yoav Freund
  • William Friedman
  • Dov Gabbay
  • Dennis Gabor
  • Peter Gacs
  • Eugene Garfield
  • David Gelernter
  • Bernard Gold
  • Robert Gold
  • Adele Goldberg
  • Oded Goldreich
  • Adele Goldstine
  • Herman Goldstine
  • Shafi Goldwasser
  • Solomon Golomb
  • I. J. Good
  • Calvin Gottlieb
  • Leslie Greengard
  • Stephen Grossberg
  • Stuart Haber
  • Joseph Halpern
  • Frank Heart
  • Martin Hellman
  • Leon Henkin
  • Jeffrey Hoffstein
  • Douglas Hofstadter
  • Włodzimierz Holsztyński
  • Jean Ichbiah
  • Neil Immerman
  • Irwin Jacobs
  • Fred Jelinek
  • Amos Joel, Jr.
  • William Kahan
  • Robert Kahn
  • Leonid Kantorovich
  • Mitchell Kapor
  • Richard Karp
  • John Kemeny
  • Alexander Khinchine
  • Peter Kirstein
  • Jon Kleinberg
  • Leonard Kleinrock
  • John Klensin
  • Neal Koblitz
  • Manfred Kochen
  • Zvi Kohavi
  • Daphne Koller
  • János Körner
  • Saul Kripke
  • Joseph Kruskal
  • Solomon Kullback
  • Robert Kurshan
  • Raymond Kurzweil
  • Harold Kushner
  • Leslie Lamport
  • Cornelius Lanczos
  • Rolf Landauer
  • Peter Lax
  • Richard Leibler
  • Abraham Lempel
  • Douglas Lenat
  • Leonid Levin
  • Barbara Liskov
  • Amnon Lotem
  • Herman Lukoff
  • Benoit Mandelbrot
  • Solomon Marcus
  • Norman Margolis
  • Yossi Matias
  • John McCarthy 4
  • Victor S. Miller
  • Marvin Minsky
  • Shlomo Moran
  • Joel Moses
  • Yoram Moses
  • Moni Naor
  • Francis Narin
  • Arkadi Nemirovski
  • John von Neumann
  • Lucien Neustadt
  • Max Newman 5
  • Noam Nisan
  • Kobbi Nissim
  • Alan Oppenheim
  • Larry Page 6
  • Seymour Papert
  • David Parnas
  • Judea Pearl
  • Kenneth Perlin
  • Alan Perlis
  • Radia Perlman
  • Charles Peskin
  • Rózsa Péter
  • Mark Pinsker
  • Gabriel Pinski
  • Gordon Plotkin
  • Amir Pnueli
  • Henry Pollak
  • Emil Post
  • Moritz Presburger
  • William Press
  • Hilary Putnam 7
  • Michael Rabin
  • Lawrence Rabiner
  • Charles Rackoff
  • Oded Regev
  • Barney Reiffen
  • Omer Reingold
  • Alfréd Rényi
  • Phillip Rogaway
  • Vladimir Rokhlin
  • Amir Ronen
  • Frank Rosenblatt
  • Azriel Rosenfeld
  • Grzegorz Rozenberg
  • Reuven Rubinstein
  • Steven Rudich
  • Shmuel Safra
  • Michael Saks
  • Gerard Salton
  • Hanan Samet
  • Jean Sammet
  • David Schaefer
  • Robert Schapire
  • Fred Schneider
  • Bruce Schneier
  • Jacob T. Schwartz
  • Mischa Schwartz
  • Gil Schweid
  • Shlomo Shamai (Shitz)
  • Adi Shamir
  • Alexander Shapiro
  • Nir Shavit
  • Scott Shenker
  • Naum Shor
  • Joseph Silverman
  • Herbert Simon 8
  • Marvin Simon
  • Michael Sipser
  • Daniel Sleator 9
  • David Slepian
  • Daniel Slotnick
  • Gustave Solomon
  • Ray Solomonoff
  • Robert Solovay
  • Eduardo Sontag
  • Daniel Spielman
  • Richard Stallman
  • Irvin Stiglitz
  • Steven Strogatz
  • Gerald Sussman
  • Ilya Sutskever
  • Peter Swerling
  • Leo Szilard
  • Andrew Tanenbaum
  • Éva Tardos
  • Gábor Tardos
  • Robert Tarjan 10
  • Alfred Tarski
  • Boris Trakhtenbrot
  • Joseph Traub
  • Stanislaw Ulam
  • Jeffrey Ullman
  • Stephen Unger
  • Leslie Valiant
  • Vladimir Vapnik
  • Moshe Vardi
  • Uzi Vishkin
  • Andrew Viterbi
  • Abraham Wald
  • Stephen Warshall
  • Peter Weinberger
  • Joseph Weizenbaum
  • Norbert Wiener
  • Jerome Wiesner
  • Stephen Wiesner
  • Avi Wigderson
  • Shmuel Winograd
  • Terry Winograd
  • Jack Wolf
  • Jacob Wolfowitz
  • Stephen Wolfram 11
  • Aaron Wyner
  • David Yudin
  • Howard Yudkin
  • Lotfi Zadeh 12
  • Jacob Ziv

NOTES

1.
In Eye of the Hurricane: An Autobiography (World Scientific, Singapore, 1984, Chapter 1), Bellman indicates that his maternal grandmother was Jewish, but states that he suspects that his Polish-born, maternal grandfather, Samuel Saffian, was of Catholic origin, although he practiced no religion.  "Saffian" is, in fact, most commonly a Jewish name and a "Samuel Saffian" from Poland, married to a Jewish woman, would most likely have been of Jewish origin.  (Spelled "Safian," the name is almost exclusively Jewish.  Spelled with a double "f," the name can also be German, but it is not Armenian, as Bellman implies that it may have been.)  A few sentences later, he states that "I suspect  also that my father was also only  one-half Jewish" {emphasis added).  This seems to be saying that his father was nominally Jewish.  Genealogical evidence indicates that all four of Bellman's grandparents were Jewish.

2.
In Men of Mathematics, Eric Temple Bell described Cantor as being "of pure Jewish descent on both sides," although both parents were baptized.  In a 1971 article entitled "Towards a Biography of Georg Cantor," the British historian of mathematics Ivor Grattan-Guinness claimed (Annals of Science 27, pp. 345-391, 1971) to be unable to find any evidence of Jewish  ancestry (although he conceded that Cantor's wife, Vally Guttmann, was Jewish).   However, a letter written by Georg Cantor to Paul Tannery in 1896 (Paul Tannery, Memoires Scientifique 13 Correspondance, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1934, p. 306) explicitly acknowledges that Cantor's paternal grandparents were members of the Sephardic Jewish community of Copenhagen.  Specifically, Cantor states in describing his father: "Er ist aber in Kopenhagen geboren, von israelitischen Eltern, die der dortigen portugisischen Judengemeinde..."  ("He was born in Copenhagen of Jewish parents from the local Portuguese-Jewish community.")  In a recent book, The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity (Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 2000, pp. 94, 144), Amir Aczel provides new evidence concerning the ancestry of Cantor's mother in the form of  an excerpt from a  letter that was written by Georg Cantor's brother Ludwig to their mother [reproduced in its entirety, but in French translation from the original German, by Nathalie Charraud in her book Infini et Inconscient: Essai sur Georg Cantor (Anthropos - Economica, Paris, 1994, p. 8)]. This letter begins [in the original German, a fragment of which appears in Georg Cantor: 1845-1918, by Walter Purkert and Hans Joachim Ilgauds (Birkhäuser, Basel, 1987, p. 15)]: "Mögen wir zehnmal von Juden abstammen und ich im Princip noch so sehr für Gleichberechtigung der Hebräer sein, im socialen Leben sind mir Christen lieber ..."  The translation of this sentence is: "We may be descended from Jews ten times over and I (may be) in principle ever so much for the equal rights of the Hebrews, (but) in social life I prefer Christians...," or equivalently: "Even though we are descended from Jews ten times over and I am in principle ever so much for the equal rights of the Hebrews, in social life I still prefer Christians..."   Charraud renders the (complete) sentence in a slightly different manner as follows: "Męme si c'est dix fois vrai que nous descendons de juifs et si je suis en principe entičrement pour l'égalité des droits avec les Hébreux, dans la vie sociale je préfčre les chrétiens et je ne me sentirai jamais ŕ l'aise dans une société exclusivement juive."   Later on in the same letter, Ludwig states: "Mais nous sommes, bien que je possčde moi-męme un nez juif, dans nos principes et nos habitudes tellement non-juifs...," which translates as: "But we are -  even though I myself possess Jewish features - so non-Jewish in our beliefs and customs..."  In other words, Ludwig is arguing that even though the family is ethnically Jewish, it is culturally and religiously non-Jewish.  What is significant about this letter, as Aczel first pointed out, is that it was written to the mother of Georg Cantor and would, therefore, have made little sense if she hadn't herself been of Jewish descent.  According to Ismerjük''oket?: zsidó származású nevezetes magyarok arcképcsarnoka, by István Reményi Gyenes (Ex Libris, Budapest, 1997, pp. 132-133), Cantor's maternal great uncle (i.e., the brother of his maternal grandfather), the great violin pedagogue Josef Böhm, was a Jew by birth.  [N.B.: There are now erroneous translations of the sentence: "Mögen wir zehnmal von Juden abstammen..." appearing elsewhere on the Internet.  The sentence has the basic structure "even if A and B, nevertheless C," where the  enumeration of A and B is clearly intended to mitigate the expression of prejudice in C, i.e., the term "even if" is employed in the sense of "even though."  These other translations attempt to render the sentence: "Even if it were the case A and even though it is the case B, nevertheless C."  Since the term "Mögen" (which generates the "even if" expression) appears only once in the original German, it must  assume the same meaning in both cases if it is distributed over A and B in translation (i.e., if the sentence is rendered: "Even if A and even if B, nevertheless C.").  Furthermore, in our translation of the sentence, we gave the word "zehnmal" its literal meaning, viz., "ten times," which, of course,  does not make literal sense when used to modify the term "descended from."  It is fairly clear that the word is employed in this context to signify "overwhelmingly" or "completely"; perhaps the best translation of the word in this context is "one thousand percent."   From that standpoint, even if the "we" in the sentence was somehow intended to refer to the Cantor children only (and not to their mother, to whom the letter is addressed), it would still imply that she was "descended from Jews."]
 
 
3. Jewish, or mostly Jewish, father, non-Jewish mother.  At least three of Vinton Cerf's four paternal great grandparents were Jews.  Bennett Cerf, the (Jewish) co-founder of publishing giant Random House, was a cousin.

4.
Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists, by Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere (Copernicus/Springer-Verlag, New York, 1995, p. 23).

5. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.  See "Max Newman: Mathematician, Codebreaker and Computer Pioneer," by William Newman in Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers, edited by B. Jack Copeland (Oxford, Oxford and New York, 2006, p. 180). A longer (unpublished) version of this article describes the father of Max Newman as "a Jewish immigrant."

6.  Jewish mother, non-Jewish father; see The Google Story, by David Vise and Mark Malseed (Delta, New York, 2006, p. 23).

7.
See A Certain People, by Charles E. Silberman (Summit Books, New York, 1985, pp. 247-248).  Putnam has described himself as a "practicing Jew."  See also Hilary Putnam's Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2002, p. 2). 

8.
Jewish father, mother of partial Jewish ancestry; see Models of My Life by Herbert A. Simon, BasicBooks, New York,NY, 1991, pp. 3, 17, 112, 262.

9. Jewish mother (née Esther Kaplan), non-Jewish father.  See http://biography.jrank.org/pages/1688/Sleator-William-Warner-III-1945.html and the fifth paragraph of the third chapter of Oddballs ("Frank's Mother), by brother William Sleator: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sleator/oddballs/oddballs-web/oddballs.html.

10.
Son of Dr. George Tarjan, 112th President of the American Psychiatric Association, who "was raised in an intellectual, liberal Jewish family" in Hungary, where his parents and younger brother Endre perished in the Holocaust; see obituary in the American Journal of Psychiatry (150:5, May 1993, pp. 691-694).

11. Son of Sybil and Hugo Wolfram, Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, who immigrated to England as children in 1933.  The Oxford University philosopher and social anthropologist Sybil Wolfram was the daughter of the Jewish child psychiatrist Kate (née Frankl) Friedlaender, an associate of Anna Freud; see the obituary for Sybil Wolfram in Anthropology Today  (Vol. 9, No. 6, December 1993, p. 22) and the article on Kate Friedländer in the
Encyclopaedia Judaica (Keter, Jerusalem, 1972, Vol. 7, p. 185).   On Hugo Wolfram, a writer whose novels Into a Neutral Country  and Root and Branch deal with the plight of Central European refugees, see http://www.juedischeliteraturwestfalen.de/index.php?valex=101&vArticle=1&author_id=00000308&id=1.

12. Jewish mother
(née Fanya Koriman).



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