Norman Margolus
Norman H. Margolus | |
---|---|
Born | 1955 (age 68–69) |
Other names | Norm Margolus |
Citizenship | Canadian, American |
Alma mater | MIT |
Known for | |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Computer Science, Cellular Automata |
Website | people |
Norman H. Margolus (born 1955)[1] is a Canadian-American[2] physicist and computer scientist, known for his work on cellular automata and reversible computing.[3] He is a research affiliate with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[4]
Education and career
Margolus received his Ph.D. in physics in 1987 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the supervision of Edward Fredkin.[5] He founded and was chief scientist for Permabit, an information storage device company.[6]
Research contributions
Margolus was one of the organizers of a seminal research meeting on the connections between physics and computation theory, held on Mosquito Island in 1982.[7] He is known for inventing the block cellular automaton and the Margolus neighborhood for block cellular automata, which he used to develop cellular automaton simulations of billiard-ball computers.[3][8][9]
In the same work, Margolus also showed that the billiard ball model could be simulated by a second-order cellular automaton, a different type of cellular automaton invented by his thesis advisor, Edward Fredkin. These two simulations were among the first cellular automata that were both reversible (able to be run backwards as well as forwards for any number of time steps, without ambiguity) and universal (able to simulate the operations of any computer program);[10] this combination of properties is important in low-energy computing, as it has been shown that the energy dissipation of computing devices may be made arbitrarily small if and only if they are reversible.[11]
In connection with this issue, Margolus and his co-author Lev B. Levitin proved the
With
See also
References
- ISBN 1-57955-008-8.
- The Atlantic Monthly.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-7432-4263-9.
- ^ CSAIL directory Archived 2011-04-26 at the Wayback Machine, accessed 2011-02-03.
- ^ Margolus, Norman H. (1987), Physics and Computation (PDF), Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- ^ Shread, Paul (October 27, 2003), "Permabit Makes a Case for CAS", Enterprise IT Planet.
- ISBN 978-0-201-12278-7.
- Bibcode:1986taca.book.....W.
- ^ Schiff, Joel L. (2008), "4.2.1 Partitioning Cellular Automata", Cellular Automata: A Discrete View of the World, Wiley, pp. 115–116.
- .
- ISBN 978-3-527-40992-1.
- S2CID 468290.
- PMID 15521147.
- ISBN 978-981-238-183-5.
- New York Times.
- S2CID 8764584.
External links
- Margolus' web site at MIT