Born in the vicarage in Lenham, Kent, he was the second of the parish priest's three children. He joined The Pilgrim's school, Winchester, in 1932 and became a senior chorister at the cathedral. Three years later, he won the top entrance scholarship to Winchester College, where his precocious talents in mathematics and music flourished. In 1941, he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, to read chemistry, but at the end of his first year also took part one of the music tripos, and was appointed Balliol organ scholar. In his second year, Christopher performed what Dr John Jones has described as "probably the greatest intellectual feat by a Balliol undergraduate ever": he proposed, with convincing arguments, the correct structure of the chemical compound diborane (B2H6) - a compound that defied contemporary chemical valency principles.

The American scientist Joshua Lederberg, who has died aged 82, won the 1958 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for showing that bacteria can conjugate and exchange small strips of genetic material. Among the consequences of this was the realisation that antibiotic resistance can be passed around between bacteria, rather than emerging from selective breeding of resistant strains. This opened new paths in genetic research. He went on to a distinguished career in science policy, advising government committees and presidents, heading Rockefeller University and writing a Washington Post column on science and society. Lederberg's father was an orthodox rabbi - the family had come to New York from Palestine - who wanted Joshua to follow in his footsteps.

MUNICH, Germany Computer pioneer and philosopher Joseph Weizenbaum (85) has died in Berlin. The scientist and MIT professor emeritus was known for his critical position towards the impact of information technology to society. Born in Berlin to Jewish parents, Weizenbaum had emigrated in 1936 to the United States. After having contributed to the development of the first analog computers and participating in the design of the first digital computers for banking applications, Weizenbaum in 1963 took a position at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT); from 1970 he was professor for computer science. Among his major achievements were studies over the SLIP programming language and research on basic software technologies which today are in widespread use such as garbage collection algorithms.

Christos Papadimitriou, the C. Lester Hogan Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, is this year's recipient of the Katyanagi Prize for Research Excellence. Carnegie Mellon University has cited Dr. Papadimitriou as "an internationally recognized expert on the theory of algorithms and complexity, and its applications to databases, optimization, artificial intelligence, networks and game theory." We recently spoke with Papadimitriou, where among other topics we delved into the underpinnings of science, the economics of the programming market, the mysterious complexity of the Web, quantum computing, and the computer scientist as popular novelist. Next month, we talk with Dr. Erik Demaine, recipient of this year's Katyanagi Emerging Leadership Prize. CP: I didn't know I had been nominated. She mentioned the previous winner, so I thought someone else won the prize and that I was invited to speak at the ceremony. I replied, "Yeah, okay, let me think about it, give me a week..." She wrote back in astonishment, thinking I was not accepting the prize!

Cover was a man of remarkable breadth in his research interests, making landmark contributions in fields ranging from information theory and mathematical statistics to data compression, pattern recognition and stock market investment strategies. Thomas Cover, one of the world's top information theorists and a professor of electrical engineering and of statistics at Stanford University, died March 26 at Stanford Hospital at the age of 73. "A senior colleague at MIT often referred to Tom Cover as'the jewel in Stanford's crown.' He certainly was," said Abbas El Gamal, professor of electrical engineering. "Not only was he one of the greatest information theorists since Claude Shannon (and the one most like Shannon in approach, clarity, and taste), but he was also one of Stanford's most inspiring teachers and mentors. "I am truly privileged to have been his student, colleague, and friend for the past 37 years.

Tony Tether has headed up the Pentagon's way-out research arm, Darpa, since 2001. That makes him the longest-serving director in the agency's nearly 50-year history. He sat down with me for an interview in his office, on the top floor of a blandly menacing Northern Virginia office building, last December. For my story in the March issue of Wired (online next Tuesday), Tether and I talked about everything from bio-terrorists to zombie rodents to thinking machines to the golf courses in Iraq. Let's start with the big picture and talk a little bit about 9/11 -- it'?s been five years now -?-? and how, obviously, that has affected defense research hugely. What do you see as Darpa's big contributions to the war on terror? What do you think has been contributed so far, and what do you think is on the horizon that might be the most valuable? Tony Tether: We have several efforts in use in Iraq and Afghanistan today. There's been somewhat of a misunderstanding that when 9/11 unfolded that Darpa suddenly turned totally toward supplying things for the war. Now, of course, the war made us a great deal more interested in trying to find out what the issues and problems were over there so that we could develop programs along that line. Those programs are long-range and, for the most part, they'?re things that won't really come to fruition for several years. On the other hand, Darpa had started many things in the '90s, because we've been looking at this global terrorist war since probably 1994. At that time we called it the transnational threat –?? you know, a threat without a country. At the same time, there was a great push to look at the way our forces were developed and move them from huge divisions, force on force, to small units of action, back to the squad… As it turned out, 2001 came and we went into war in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and, after the major conflict in Iraq, really small units became the way we were orchestrating that war. And it was probably that way from the very beginning in Afghanistan. So the technologies that we have been developing for four or five years, some of them were already ready to go. TT: One of the major things we knew a small unit would need, especially in a city, was situational awareness. So we developed â?? we already had been developing -- a small platform that we call Wasp.

Do you think AI will decrease human labor? So if foreseeable technologies materialize, then then the need for human labor could decrease. Technology always puts existing jobs under strain. This doesn't immediately mean that human labor as a whole is under threat. Generally, other professions grow to fill the loss, often creating more jobs than the ones that are lost.

In April 2008 I wrote "Where Have All the Great Programmers Gone?" . In trying to answer the question, I contrasted the contemporary introduction to programming with the way it was learned in the 1950s. The first was that one of the prerequisites for being a promising oddball was that of having a nontrivial college degree. Examples were philosophy (J. A. Robinson), English literature (Mark Halpern), Classics (C. A. R. Hoare), Physics (E.W. Dijkstra). Being thrown into the deep end in this way was educative, something that cannot be said of the typical first-year programming text, dumbed down in the way that only Educators have the secret of. A Programmer's Place (APP) has yet to snag Hoare or Halpern, but was fortunate to find J.A. Robinson available for an interview.

The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, which most people refer to as Xerox PARC, is one of the most fabled institutions in Silicon Valley. PARC is also where Steve Jobs and early Apple engineers took inspiration for aspects of the Macintosh computer. Today, Xerox PARC remains an active operation with a host of commercial clients, focused in areas that include printed electronics, data and analytics, cleantech, and contextual intelligence. During the conversation, we talked about innovation, managing brilliant researchers, and the critical importance of user experience. One of the fascinating parts of our discussion was a window Steve provided into PARC's work on the Internet of Things.

Even by the standards of the TED conference, Henry Markram's 2009 TEDGlobal talk was a mind-bender. He took the stage of the Oxford Playhouse, clad in the requisite dress shirt and blue jeans, and announced a plan that--if it panned out--would deliver a fully sentient hologram within a decade. He dedicated himself to wiping out all mental disorders and creating a self-aware artificial intelligence. And the South African–born neuroscientist pronounced that he would accomplish all this through an insanely ambitious attempt to build a complete model of a human brain--from synapses to hemispheres--and simulate it on a supercomputer. Markram was proposing a project that has bedeviled AI researchers for decades, that most had presumed was impossible. He wanted to build a working mind from the ground up. In the four years since Markram's speech, he hasn't backed off a nanometer. The self-assured scientist claims that the only thing preventing scientists from understanding the human brain in its entirety--from the molecular level all the way to the mystery of consciousness--is a lack of ambition. If only neuroscience would follow his lead, he insists, his Human Brain Project could simulate the functions of all 86 billion neurons in the human brain, and the 100 trillion connections that link them.