a friend of mine is going to the PascGalois Summer Undergraduate Retreat, a week-long retreat at New College, fl, for "students interested in mathematics, mathematics education, computer science, and/or statistics" to investigate questions related to PascGalois Triangles and group-related cellular automata. The 12 students that were accepted this year get a $300 stipend, free room and board for the entire workshop, and up to $400 of travel reimbursement.
if there are enough Cellular Automata geeks for an event like this to happen, surely there are more than enough for such an event centered around lisp/ai/functional programming. Undergrads are a pretty low-maintenance group, but 12 or so talented future developers/scientists/mathematicians annually with personal relationships centered around lisp would definitely be a non-trivial addition to the community. At ILC 05 McCarthy said something along the lines of "lisp needs more english majors", I think meaning that lisp needs more people with a passion for lisp and its practice than making money with it, politics, or computers. It seems like it could be a way to pump new kind of blood into the lisp community (and perhaps even get an open source project or two out of it)... anyways, I am not connected to the academic community, but I'd be willing to make phone-calls, break kneecaps, cook dinner, or any other elbow-greese-related tasks that would be incurred if anyone with the proper connections were interested in trying to set up such an event... Nick _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
