Gregory Chaitin is a mathematician and computer scientist who began making lasting contributions to his field while still a student at the Bronx High School of Science. His approach to mathematics views the field as much as an art form as science and inextricably linked with philosophical questions.

E.O. Wilson is a life-long explorer of the natural world whose pioneering studies of ants have led to revolutionary insights across a wide range of fields, from evolution to animal and human behavior.

George Ellis is Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics at the University of Capetown and investigates cosmology, the nature of time, and the emergence of complexity. He is the co-author with Stephen Hawking of The Large Scale Structure of Space Time.

Jürgen Schmidhuber has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers. His lab’s research on artificial neural nets won several handwriting recognition contests and number one rankings in several computer vision competitions and benchmarks.

Peter Staley has been a long-term AIDS and gay rights activist, first as a member of ACT UP New York, then as the founding director of TAG, the Treatment Action Group. He served on the board of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) for 13 years.

Daniel Gottesman is a faculty member at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario. He does research in the field of quantum computation, particularly quantum error correction, fault-tolerant quantum computation, quantum complexity, and quantum cryptography.

Duncan Watts is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and a founding member of the MSR-NYC lab. He is also an AD White Professor at Large at Cornell University. Prior to joining MSR, he was from 2000-2007 a professor of Sociology at Columbia University, and then a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research.

Marcelo Magnasco carried out his undergraduate studies in Physics at the University of La Plata, in Argentina, and his PhD, also in Physics, at the University of Chicago, and currently heads the Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience at Rockefeller University.

Lenore Blum (PhD, MIT) is Distinguished Career Professor Emerita of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Lenore’s research, from her early work in model theory and differential algebra has focused …

Manuel Blum (PhD, MIT) is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon and at UC Berkeley. Manuel has been motivated to understand the mind since he was in second …

Scott Aaronson is the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and the founding director of UT’s Quantum Information Center. He has made significant …