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This Week in History of Computing

Researchers Discover Two Major Flaws in the World’s Computers
Researchers Discover Two Major Flaws in the World’s Computers

On January 3, 2018 computer security experts have discovered two major security flaws in the microprocessors inside nearly all of the world’s computers. The two problems, called Meltdown and Spectre, could allow hackers to steal the entire memory contents of computers, including mobile devices, personal computers, and servers running in so-called cloud computer networks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/business/computer-flaws.html

Stephen Cole Kleene
Stephen Cole Kleene

On January 5, 1909 was born Stephen Cole Kleene. He was an American mathematician. He was one of the students of Alonzo Church, along with Rózsa Péter, Alan Turing, Emil Post, and others. Kleene is best known as a founder of the branch of mathematical logic known as recursion theory, which subsequently helped to provide the foundations of theoretical computer science. Kleene’s work grounds the study of computable functions. A number of mathematical concepts are named after him: Kleene hierarchy, Kleene algebra, the Kleene star (Kleene closure), Kleene’s recursion theorem and the Kleene fixpoint theorem. He also invented regular expressions in 1951 to describe McCulloch-Pitts neural networks, and made significant contributions to the foundations of mathematical intuitionism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Cole_Kleene

Susan Beth Horwitz
Susan Beth Horwitz

On January 6, 1955 was born Susan Beth Horwitz. She was an American computer scientist noted for her research on programming languages and software engineering, and in particular on program slicing and dataflow-analysis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_B._Horwitz

Joseph Weizenbaum
Joseph Weizenbaum

On January 8, 1923 was born Joseph Weizenbaum. He was a german-american computer scientist and a professor at MIT. The Weizenbaum Award is named after him. He is considered one of the fathers of modern artificial intelligence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum

Donald Knuth
Donald Knuth

On January 10, 1938 was born Donald Knuth, an American computer scientist, mathematician, and professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. He is the author of the multi-volume work The Art of Computer Programming. He contributed to the development of the rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth

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