Well, okay, somehow the fact that his life inspired a Hollywood film made it into the obit before the fact that he won the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics. (Note: "Nash called the film an 'artistic' interpretation based on his life of how mental illness could evolve -- one that did not 'describe accurately' the nature of his delusions or treatment.") But in actuality, it's enormously difficult to describe the impact that this man had on the field of Game Theory, which now underlies much of economics, politics, and has even been applied to describe the strategy of penalty shootouts in soccer (where it closely predicts the strategies that top players actually use).

And if you're anything like me, you'll find his 1950 dissertation a refreshing respite from page after page of obituary:

Non-Cooperative Games (typewriter facsimile)

Introduction

Von Neumann and Morgenstern have developed a very fruitful theory of two-person zero-sum games in their book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. This book also contains a theory of n-person games of a type which we would call cooperative. This theory is based on an analysis of the interrelationships of the various coalitions which can be formed by the players of the game.

Our theory, in contradistinction, is based on the absence of coalitions in that it is assumed that each participant acts independently, without collaboration or communication with any of the others.

The notion of an equilibrium

Happy (belated) seventy-seventh birthday to Dr. Lynn Conway, now emerita at UMich, who was dealt a really shitty hand in life and overcame it to revolutionize the field of electrical engineering, literally write the book on VLSI design (along with Dr. Carver Mead, of CIT), and, in the past fifteen years, become a outspoken trans-rights activist. She also rides motocross.

![Photograph of Dr. Lynn Conway](http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/LynnPhotos/Lynn2006.jpg" caption=""Playing is Adventuring is Exploring is Innovating is Designing is Engineering is Architecting is Art."
~Lynn Conway")

When I'm calling out heroes in STEM, I usually say something about the sort of challenges they had to overcome to achieve what they did, but Dr. Conway's story takes the cake. She was born physically male, which, as it turns out, is a really, really shitty thing to happen to you if you're a girl born in 1938. She's written a memoir on her life, which traverses the painfully personal, the fascinatingly technical, and everything in between, in the arc from her early struggles with gender identity; to her career at IBM (cut short when they fired her for transitioning male-to-female); to her subsequent second career-from-scratch at, well, everywhere; to her coming-out and subsequent trans activism. I don't have the words to recommend it highly enough. It's honest, raw, and inspiring -- oh, just read it.

Conway's accomplishments include:

• the Mead-Conway revolution in VLSI design (this is why you're able to read this on a smartphone, tablet, or laptop right now)
• "generalised dynamic instruction handling", used in out-of-order execution (this one's happening in your computer/smartphone/tablet/laptop right

It's Jonas Salk's 100th birthday (as commemorated in Google's daily doodle, above, which, ironically enough, enjoys more patent protection than does the polio vaccine it commemorates), which makes for a fine reminder that you should get your annual flu shot! By doing so, you're:

1. much less likely to get the flu
2. decreasing potential anxiety as a result of experiencing flu-like symptoms, which, annoyingly, are highly similar to the early symptoms of Ebola every disease ever.
3. protecting your friends, family, the elderly, babies, and the immunosuppressed through herd immunity.

On this last point (herd immunity), Vax is a neat online game where you try to shut down epidemics by vaccinating and quarantining people; my top scores are 94%/81%/76% in turn-based mode and 94%/91%/84% in real-time mode. It's addicting, but mercifully not that long, so you won't lose days of your life to it.

Anyway. Happy birthday, Dr. Salk. May the world always have scientists so visionary and daring. May your legacy as the man who killed a disease be less rare in the future, when we've likewise struck malaria, worms, and so many more preventable diseases from the list of things that kill us, but until then, thanks for getting us this far.

For reasons which are pretty opaque to me, apparently today has been designated Ada Lovelace Day? Which is kinda weird, since "October 14" appears nowhere on her Wikipedia page, but well, okay. At least it makes a convenient excuse to write a blog post, since she was a pretty damn cool person.

If you've never heard of Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace before, there are much better places to read about her life than on my blog. (Like what, Ross? Well, uh, this piece on The Mary Sue? Is kinda over-excited, or maybe just adequately excited. In any case, probably go read it and come back.)

So yesterday, when a friend asked me the other day what exactly "theoretical computer science" was, if not programming, I thought a little bit and said something like:

Well, imagine that, instead of actually sitting down and telling a computer to do something, you wanted to think about what sort of things a computer could do, if you instructed it right. If you think about computation as a process, as a structural description of arithmetic, and ask what you can do with that...

I mean, look at Ada Lovelace. She wrote a lot about what you could do with a computing machine, if you had one, but she didn't, so it was a century before the things she wrote down were ever ran through an automatic computer. She wasn't a programmer--she was a mathematician. And, really, a good one, too.

And then, surprise! Today is Ada Day! That's weird.

But really, if there was someone who understood what Charles Babbage's "Analytical Engine" actually was (even better than he

Today is the would-have-been-107th birthday of Grace Murray Hopper, 1906-1992. If you don't know who she was, then I assume you're capable of clicking the above link, and so you've now learned that she left an associate professorship at Vassar to enlist in the Navy Reserve (only after securing an exemption for being underweight at 105 pounds), co-authored papers with Howard Aiken on the Harvard Mark I, and later declined a full professorship at Vassar to remain a research fellow in CS at Harvard.

When Navy regulations forced her retirement at age 60, she was recalled to active duty, and later promoted to Commodore (or Rear Admiral) by an act of Congress. Why did she remain in the Navy until age 80? Because that's where the most interesting computers were, and damn all the rules telling her she couldn't be there. As an alumnus of my high school once said: "Walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They are there to stop other people!"'

Today, my office in Maxwell-Dworkin sits directly across from the "Grace Hopper conference room", but her legacy also surrounds me in my daily work: compilers, language standards, and the now-obvious concept that code should be "readable". ("But Grace, then anyone will be able to write programs!")

Perhaps it's