Featured in Five is a monthly section where we pose five questions to a Computing Reviews featured reviewer. Here are the responses from our October featured reviewer, Arturo Ortiz-Tapia.
Q) What is the most important thing that's happened in computing in the past 10 years?
A) As for hardware, I don't think I would be too mistaken if I say the birth of quantum computing. Concerning software, we could mention the massification and ramification not only of cloud storage (Google Drive, Zenodo) but also of cloud computing (take Wolfram Alpha 2009, Symbolab, and GeoGebra 2011; GeoGebra existed before, but it started working as cloud computing in 2011), cloud research sharing, and question-answer networks (Overleaf, Stack Exchange, Overflow, Quora, and ResearchGate), just to give some examples that roughly fall within the decade range.
Q) If you weren't working in the computer science field, what would you be doing instead?
A) Something between what Umberto Eco, Noah Chomsky, Edward Sapir, and Benjamin Lee Whorf researched. In a way, I would still be working to understand cognition and artificial intelligence.
Q) By the end of your career, where do you think computer science will have taken us? What are you working on that might contribute toward that?
A) Quite possibly, computer science will have worked with cognition sciences and quantum theories to advance human evolution itself. Humans will have developed the capacity to entangle at will with the collective consciousness not only of humanity, but with the awareness of information stored in the quantum field of the universe in more dimensions than we currently perceive, thus converting people into qubits, or more than one qubit per person.
I have been working with a team of experimental scientists about the connection between human awareness and quantum entanglement, and the results thus far look quite promising. Theoretically there have been advances in several disciplines that interact with computer science, like the relationship of Gödel's incompleteness theorem and the possible endless discovery of order in the universe (according to a statement by Stephen W. Hawking). The results have been published as a preprint in ResearchGate and a more detailed book is forthcoming.
I have also been working on some properties of Lucas sequences and their relationship with Julia sets through a finite set of points in the complex plane, resembling some parts of the geometrical aspect of the Mandelbrot set. One of those points is the golden ratio, and the other points follow a similar structure. At this point it is still a result in pure mathematics, but the resemblance of that set of points with the Mandelbrot set, and the fact that the golden ratio is involved, makes me think that fractals, through computer science, may still deliver many fruits when it comes to understanding (and even perceiving) the complexity of the universe.
Q) Who is your favorite historical figure? Why?
A) It is between Hypatia and Sofya Kovalevskaya. Hypatia because of her love of mathematics, and while I know it has been a bit romanticized, it is sort of true that she died defending the works of Euclid, among others. Kovalevskaya also has a romantic component—for example, she died when she was 41, which forces me to acknowledge that I am already older than that. But on a more serious note, it is because she worked in subjects that I have worked on myself for a significant portion of my life.
Q) What is your favorite type of music?
A) Depending on my mood, I listen to just about everything, from Shamanic songs to hip hop, crossing over to Indian sitar and African kalimba music, and of course John Williams and Hans Zimmer film scores. However, the only music I can listen to when I am eating or working peacefully comes from the Baroque or Romantic periods, more or less. Johann Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are very prominent, always. I reserve jazz for when I’m drinking coffee in a nice place, reading the latest news in mathematics, or talking to friends.
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Click here to read one of Arturo’s recent reviews.
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