Pickover was elected as a Fellow for theCommittee for Skeptical Inquiry 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."[3] Other Fellows have includedCarl Sagan andIsaac Asimov. He has been awarded almost 700 United States patents,[1] and hisThe Math Book was winner of the 2011Neumann Prize.[4]
He is currently an associate editor for the scientific journalComputers and Graphics and is an editorial board member forOdyssey andLeonardo. He is also the Brain-Strain columnist forOdyssey magazine, and, for many years, he was the Brain-Boggler columnist forDiscover magazine.
Pickover has received more than 100 IBM invention achievement awards, three research division awards, and four external honor awards.[2]
In the 1990s, Pickover created virtual caverns from extremely simple numerical simulations that reminded him of theLechuguilla Cave, pictured here.[6][7]Example of Pickover stalks in a detail of the Mandelbrot set
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.[8]InThe Math Book and his companion bookThe 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."[9]Pickover is an inventor with over 700patents, 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.[2]
Pickover is author of hundreds of technical papers in diverse fields, ranging from the creative visualizations of fossil seashells,[10] genetic sequences,[11][12] cardiac[13] and speech sounds, and virtual caverns[14] andlava lamps,[15] to fractal and mathematically based studies.[16][17][18][19] 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").[20] Additional visualization work includes topics that involve breathing motions of proteins,[21] snow-flake like patterns for speech sounds,[22] cartoon-face representations of data,[23] and biomorphs.[24]
Pickover has also written extensively on the reported experiences of people on the psychotropic compoundDMT.[25][26] Such apparent entities asMachine Elves are described as well as "Insects From A Parallel Universe".[26]
On November 4, 2006, he beganWikidumper.org, a popular blog featuring articles being considered for deletion byEnglish Wikipedia.
Pickover stalks are certain kinds of details that are empirically found in theMandelbrot set in the study offractal geometry. 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 ofinterior 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.[27][28]
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.[29]
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".[30]
In mathematics, avampire number ortrue vampire number is acompositenatural numberv, with an even number ofdigitsn, that can be factored into twointegersx andy each withn/2 digits and not both with trailing zeroes, wherev contains all the digits fromx and fromy, in any order.x andy are called thefangs. 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 theUsenet group sci.math, and the article he later wrote was published in chapter 30 of his bookKeys to Infinity.[31]
In addition to "Vampire numbers",[32]a term Pickover actually coined, he has coined the following terms in the area of mathematics:Leviathan number,[33]factorion,[34]Carotid–Kundalini function and fractal,[35] batrachion,[36]Juggler sequence,[37] and Legion's number,[38] among others. For characterizing noisy data, he has usedTruchet tiles and Noise spheres,[39] 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?",[40] and he computed "All Known Replicating Fibonacci Digits Less than One Billion".[41] With his colleagueJohn R. Hendricks, he was the first to compute the smallest perfect(nasik) magic tesseract.[42] The "Pickover sequence" dealing with e and pi was named after him,[43] as was the "Cliff random number generator"[44] and the Pickover attractor, sometimes also referred to as the Clifford Attractor.[45][46]
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 includesSex, 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.".[47] Pickover follows-up his "quest for transcendence" and examination of popular culture withA Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection.
Starting in 2008, Pickover's books began to focus on the history of science and mathematics, with such titles asArchimedes to Hawking, as well asThe Math Book,The Physics Book, andThe Medical Book—a trilogy of more than 1,500 pages that presents various historical milestones, breakthroughs, and curiosities.
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'tcite their sources. The site has been criticized as likely to be less accurate than English Wikipedia.[48]
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