“What does Steve Jobs have in common with a 13th century Italian from Pisa named Leonardo?” writes Athens News reporter David Dewitt.
Turns out, quite a lot, as was explored by Stanford professor Keith Devlin in the first and only Kennedy Lecture Series speech of the fall semester Tuesday night at Ohio University’s Memorial Auditorium.
While researching the work of Leonardo of Pisa, also known as Leonardo Fibonacci, Devlin said that he began to discover remarkable similarities between Leonardo and Jobs.
“These are two people who deserve credit for changing the world through new technology, or, more precisely, a new representation,” Devlin told the audience.
In fact, the similarities were so many, he said, that in addition to writing the book he was originally researching, “The Man of Numbers,” on Leonardo, he wrote a second, “Leonardo & Steve.”
Devlin began his lecture by presenting a brief history on Apple and Jobs. He explained how computers went from the province of “nerds” writing code in the early 1980s to something much more with the advent of the Macintosh.
Devlin is ‘the Math Guy” on National Public Radio and a mathematician at Stanford University in California, where he is a co-founder and Executive Director of the university’s H-STAR institute, a co-founder of the Stanford Media Xresearch network, and a Senior Researcher at CSLI. He is a World Economic Forum Fellow, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, according to his website.
Dr. Scott Moody, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, introduced Dr. Devlin and noted that the many questions from the audience included several from children who attended the lecture with their parents. The Kennedy Lecture Series is funded through an endowment by the late Edwin and Ruth Kennedy.
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