Oh, Ariela, daughter of the People of the Book, the work of the mind is our game!
–Miriam Yevick
I first became aware of Miriam Lipschutz Yevick through my interest in human perception and thought. I believed that her 1975 paper, Holographic or Fourier Logic, was quite important. David Hays and I gave it a prominent place in our 1988 paper, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence, and in a related paper on metaphor.
Since Yevick’s work shares a mathematics with some work in machine vision and image recognition, I wondered whether or not that paper had been cited. Moreover, that work is relevant to current debates about the need for symbolic processing in artificial intelligence (AI). As recently as 2007 Yevick was arguing, albeit informally, that human thought requires both poetic, Gestalt, or holographic processing, on the one hand, and analytic, propositional, or logical on the other.
As far as I can tell, her work has been forgotten.
That is one thing. But there is more. I become curious about her, this woman, Miriam Lipschutz Yevick.
What about her? And so I began reading her 2012 memoire, A Testament for Ariela, which takes the form of letters she had written to her grand-daughter in a three-year period in the mid-1980s. The memoire says nothing about her mathematical ideas, though it does mention that in 1947 she became the fifth woman to get a mathematics Ph.D. from MIT. She also talks of her friendship and correspondence with David Bohm, who became a noted quantum theorist. It quickly became clear that she had not had an academic career worthy of her intellectual gifts. Yet she did not seem bitter about that. She had a rich and fulfilling life.
This essay is about both her life and her holographic logic. The work on holographic logic leads me to a harsh assessment of the current debate about artificial intelligence. Thinking about her life leads me to conclude with an optimistic look at the future: next year in Jerusalem.
A Life, a Testament
I describe A Testament for Ariela as a memoire. Yevick gives her views on many subjects. She tells us much about her life. But this is not an autobiography. The order is not chronological. Much is left out.
To be sure, we do learn something of her early life, that she was born in Scheveningen, Holland, on August 28, 1924, and that the family moved to Antwerp in 1935. Her father was a diamond dealer. She first knew shame in 1926 when she wet her bed the night her sister was born. In 1930 her Montessori school introduced her to the joy of reading.
She tells us that she became a socialist in 1931. She was walking in Scheveningen with her aunt when they came upon a herring peddler:
“Listen to his voice, how hoarse it has turned of late from all this yelling,” she said. “Soon he will need an operation.” “But after that he will not peddle again,” I asserted. “Yes, he will go back. He has a family to feed.”
The next year, 1932, she overheard her brother and mother talking about Hitler, a name she’d not heard before.
That brings us to the one section of the book that is chronological, her family’s three-month flight from the Nazis. The bombs came at 5 a.m. on the morning of August 28, 1940. Their departure was hurried. Nothing was certain. Officials were bribed; diamonds were hidden; soldiers marched by (some were handsome); Marshal Pétain capitulated to the Germans and France became a danger zone; they are befriended by a Marrano in Madrid. And so it went.
Our flight occurred in three stages: from Antwerp to La Panne on the Belgian coast (by taxi); from there four days later across the French border (by bus and then by train) to Cognac and two days later to Royan in the South of France; and after a month of apparent normalcy, a renewed trek by bus to the South Atlantic border of France and from there through the Pyrenées to the Mediterranean and into Spain. The first and the last of these wanderings were in small commuter buses which father exhumed in miraculous ways and loaded to near twice their capacity. All those who came along survived the war.
They left Antwerp on May 11 and arrived in Hoboken aboard the Nea Hellas on August.
The next day we took a walk on Broadway. I saw a striking dress in a shop window: sky blue with bold purple stripes descending diagonally from both shoulders to meet along the centerline of the body. I went into the store and bought the dress, which accentuated my youthful shape, for $ 1. Ready-made!
Still, as I said, much is left out. We learn that her husband George taught physics at Stevens Institute in Hoboken, New Jersey, but she tells us little else about him. She tells us that she named her son, David (Ariela’s father), after David Bohm, and that he went to Harvard, beyond that… Nor, for that matter, do we learn much about her mathematical ideas – she doesn’t mention that 1975 article – though we learn that she taught remedial math to adults. A Testament for Ariela omits much that would be central in an autobiography.
These reflections and recollections are a testament. Last will and testament. The New and the Old Testaments. Miriam Lipschutz Yevick is bearing witness.
In her preface she tells us her testament
… is for grandmothers and granddaughters, for seniors and adolescents and mothers-to-be, and for all women who hope to create a better world for their children and grandchildren and for future generations. These letters to my granddaughter, Ariela, were written in the hope that my experiences over a lifetime of eighty-seven years as a mathematician, a scholar and writer, a leftist and activist, a mother and grandmother might inspire and sustain her in the struggles that await her in life. And it happened that in re-reading what I wrote years ago to Ariela, I was re-inspired to hold on to my own purpose in life.
Yevick was unable to secure academic employment once she got her degree in 1947 at the precocious age of 23. Women did not have academic careers in those days – even 20 years later women were scarce in the academy (I only remember three women on the faculty at Johns Hopkins when I was there in the late 1960s). One examiner was particularly harsh during her doctoral defense, grilling her “mercilessly on unrelated questions.” She judged he was a misogynist.
She held visiting posts at various places, University of Victoria, Princeton, and City College, but her only permanent post was at Rutgers University College, starting in 1964. It was a four-year school for adult learners. She retired with only the rank of Associate Professor and never held the kind of research post her ideas merited.
Think about that. She did not coast into graduate school because, what else? – as some of my peers did. She was an intelligent young woman pursuing an intellectual passion at a time when the world had little room for women’s intellectual achievement. That passion continued to animate her as an independent scholar when, during a visit to Princeton in January of 1948, she met a young David Bohm and became his disciple (her word), corresponding with him during the 1950s during his political exile in Brazil.
While at Rutgers she developed a course, “Mathematics for Life and Society,” specifically designed to teach remedial mathematics to women re-entering the workplace.
And in the city of Newark, many mothers who had grown up in poverty were coming to the college at night where Grandma taught mathematics. Her students rose very early in the morning, made breakfast for their children and sent them off to school, cooked dinner to be ready in the evening when they came home, went to their jobs and worked all day; then they went to class. Sometimes, if the baby-sitter was ill or daddy could not give the children dinner, the children came along to college. They sat next to their mothers in Grandma’s class, quietly drawing with crayons or watching the strange symbols on the blackboard with a dubious look. Then they stared proudly at their mothers who studied so hard to earn the college degree which would improve their lot.
I am reminded of Goethe’s Faust, who sought the secrets of the universe in his youth, making a bargain with the Devil in the process, but ended up reclaiming land from the sea in old age. That’s quite an evolution, from intellectual firebrand to real estate developer. Perhaps Miriam Yevick underwent a similar progression.
Perhaps her life-long participation in the Passover Seder guided her. There is a point in the ritual where the participants must eat maror, bitter herbs, symbolizing the bitterness of slavery in Egypt – accept the bitter with the sweet. Perhaps, in contemplating her life, her history, Jewish history, human history, could not she begin actually to sense sweetness within those bitter herbs? Could not the experience of working with those mothers have revealed the mystery of transforming bitterness into sweetness? Had the maror come to taste like honey?
She retired from Rutgers during the course of writing these memoirs.And I, Ariela, have retired. The free time I yearned for to complete my work is now mine.
And once again my heart is pounding. Will I still have the will to do as intended and yet be true to my human obligations? Or will the finiteness of time, the softening and silencing of age cut off my visions? My search for ever new insights? will my will win, Ariela? Will you encourage me to give what I still can to those around me and those yet to come?
I have risen early several more times in my life to see the world from some lofty viewpoint. On Berkeley’s hills I have overlooked the silver bay with the peaks of the white houses of San Francisco seemingly floating in the fog like a fairyland. And I have mounted the tower of Kibbutz Yehiam’s crusaders’ fort among the hills of Galilee. The Mediterranean Sea shimmered in the west; centuries-old groves of olive trees covered the gray-green mountainsides and cedar trees adorned their crests. Arab villages blended into the landscape and wild cyclamen flowered at my feet. I hummed the tune of Dominique, the singing nun:
“Je veux faire de ma vie quelque chose de bien.”
(I want to make something good of my life).
Cognitivism, Holographic Logic, and the mind
To appreciate the significance of Yevick’s work on holographic logic we need to understand the intellectual context. Cognitive science, as it is called, was riding high at the time, the mid-1970s. Roughly speaking, cognitive science is what happened when the idea of computing, and of digital computing in particular, intersected with work in psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and neuroscience. Computing, along with the closely related idea of information processing, provided a way of thinking about mental operations that didn’t depend on immaterial spirits or some mysterious mental substance to do the heavy intellectual lifting. To be sure, we couldn’t observe these computational processes in any direct way, but we could construct computer models and simulations of at least some processes and we could, on that basis, justify speculation about more sophisticated processes that we could not yet actually construct.
In 1975 Allen Newell and Herbert Simon received the Turing Award – roughly speaking, the computer science equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Their Turing Award lecture, Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search, was published the next year. Here is the core idea (p. 116):
The Physical Symbol System Hypothesis. A physical symbol system has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent action.
By “necessary” we mean that any system that exhibits general intelligence will prove upon analysis to be a physical symbol system. By “sufficient” we mean that any physical symbol system of sufficient size can be organized further to exhibit general intelligence. By “general intelligent action” we wish to indicate the same scope of intelligence as we see in human action: that in any real situation behavior appropriate to the ends of the system and adaptive to the demands of the environment can occur, within some limits of speed and complexity.
The paper is important and influential. As much as any single paper could, it captured the spirit of the age.
It was during this period that Steven Harnad founded a new journal, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), which was modeled on Current Anthropology. Authors would submit comprehensive articles on topics of current interest. Upon acceptance, 10 to 30 or so other scholars would submit comments on the “target” article, as it was called. These comments would be published with the original article, along with a reply by the author.
The second issue, in June 1978, contained an article by the philosopher John Haugeland, The nature and plausibility of Cognitivism, which set out to review the Cognitivist program and to provide “a much needed framework for articulating questions about whether the Cognitivist approach is right or wrong.” Toward the end of his argument he offers holography as a possible alternative model to the symbolic program based on information processing systems (IPS), as he called them. Miriam Yevick is one of the scholars who wrote a comment on Haugeland’s article.
Holography is an optical process invented by Dennis Gabor in 1951, for which he won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1971. In the late 1960s and into the 1970s a number of neuroscientists became interested in holography as a model for neural processing. While Haugeland offered holography as an alternative to information processing typical, a number of commentators pointed out that holography IS a kind of IPS, albeit one with a different underlying architecture. Holography allows considerable processing of many information streams in parallel rather than the serial, one-thing-at-a-time, processing of digital computers. That is an important point, and one central to Yevick’s arguments.
Let us first pause to consider holography itself. Here’s how Haugeland describes it:
Optical holograms are photographs of interference patterns, which look kind of like the surface of a pond that has just had a lot of pebbles thrown in it. But they have some interesting properties. […] First, they are prepared from the light bouncing off an ordinary object, and can subsequently be used to reconstruct a full three-dimensional colored image of that object. Second, the whole image can be reconstructed from any large enough portion of the hologram. (That is, there’s no saying which portion of the hologram “encodes” which portion of the image). Third, a number of objects can be separately recorded on the same hologram, and there’s no saying which portion records which object. Fourth, if a hologram of an arbitrary scene is suitably illuminated with the light from a reference object, bright spots will appear indicating (virtually instantaneously) the presence and location of any occurrences of the reference object in the scene (and dimmer spots indicate “similar” objects. So some neurophysiological holographic encoding might account for a number of perplexing features of visual recall and recognition, including their speed, some of their invariances, and the fact that they are only slightly impaired by large lesions in relevant areas of the brain.
The second and third properties mean that a holograph can function as an associative memory. You glimpse a hat and recall the whole person, or recognize a song from the opening phrase – 2nd property. The sight of Uncle Julius reminds you of his cottage, the taste of a madeleine conjures up the past – 3rd property. The fourth property means that it is capable of pattern-matching – those bright spots indicate a match between a reference object and the target hologram.
For the most part, those who commented on holography noted that, while it provides a memory model, that’s all it provides. Yevick’s reply was different; her 1975 article, Holographic or Fourier Logic, suggested there was more to neural holography than memory. It can provide a logic as well, an algebra, a way of working with concepts and percepts that was distinct from and complementary to the symbolic mode at the center of Cognitivist thought.
In her comment on Haugeland’s article Yevick writes:
The author here points out a distinction between two modes of understanding our environment: the first identifies objects by quasi-linguistic representations; the other apprehends objects by means of nonarticulate skills. This dichotomy; which is undoubtedly related to the complexity of the concrete objects to be recognized or manipulated, was projected as follows by von Neumann (1966, pp. 51-54): “certain objects are such that their description is more complex than the object itself.”
Some such distinction has been around in various forms, holistic and Gestalt vs. reductionist and particular, metaphor vs. logic, example, but Yevick’s formulation is novel. She develops it in terms of visual objects and contrasts simple geometric objects, such as rectangles, triangles, and circles, with complex more natural objects, such as faces, leaves, or even Chinese characters.
Given this distinction and borrowing the technical language of her 1975 article, Yevick goes on to note:
The following holds true: a complex object requires a long (sequential, quasi-linguistic) description but yields a sharp recognition (auto-correlation) spot under holographic filtering; hence it is identified most readily by holographic recognition, or holistically. A simple object requires a short (quasi-linguistic) description but yields a diffuse recognition spot; hence it is identified most readily by quasi-linguistic representation or description.
Description and holographic recognition thus appear as two (complementary) modes of identifying an object: the more complex the object, the longer its description and the sharper its auto-correlation spot, and vice versa. The more complex the physiognomy of a person, the more unique, and hence sharper, its identity and ease of recall; the more simple, the more common and hence “unidentifiable.”
We now have two distinctions, one about objects and phenomena in the world, and the other about computational processes by which we recognize and think about those objects and phenomena. Holographic processes work best with geometrically more complex, natural objects, where symbolic processes work best with geometrically simple objects. Given the nature of our world, it follows that one cannot construct a mind on the basis of one type of process alone. Both types are needed.
While Yevick developed her argument from visual examples, being a mathematician, and a poet as well, she generalized it to all modes of mentation, leading her to assert:
If we consider that both of these modes of identification enter into our mental processes, we might speculate that there is a constant movement (a shifting across boundaries) from one mode to the other: the compacting into one unit of the description of a scene, event, and so forth that has become familiar to us, and the analysis of such into its parts by description. Mastery, skill and holistic grasp of some aspect of the world are attained when this object becomes identifiable as one whole complex unit; new rational knowledge is derived when the arbitrary complex object apprehended is analytically described.
Both processes are thus necessary for full and complete knowledge. She offers this as speculation, but it is a deep one, and speculation is necessary if we are to move forward.
Later, and less formally in The Mathematical Intelligencer in 2007, after her ideas had slipped into the undertow of intellectual history, Yevick points out:
Poincaré … defined Discovery as “appearances of sudden illuminations, obvious indications of a long course of previous unconscious work. All that one can hope for from these inspirations which are the fruit of unconscious work, is the point of departure for such calculations. They must be done in the second period of conscious work: results must be verified and consequences deduced.”
This is the dichotomy: on the one hand Zwicky’s visual intuition, the “seeing as”; on the other, a rigorous proof, which requires analytic validation, a derivation from axioms, or an algebraic computation.
Yevick’s argument is a philosophical one, one that has roots in logic, algebra, and meta-mathematics. It is about the foundations of mind and thought and their realization in matter, physical stuff. The thinkers and works she cites are foundational – Boole, Frege, von Neumann, Pribram, Gabor, Kleene, Wittgenstein, Quine, Julesz, Longuet-Higgins, Poggio, Church, and others. Miriam Yevick is telling us that we need to construct a new foundation in which to think about the human mind.
Consider two questions animating current debates: 1) Do we need symbolic computation as well as statistical, and 2) can we get THERE by nothing more than amassing more computing power? My sense is that the weight of the industry – and it is industry that dominates the discussion – is on the side of compute (as it is called). More compute, more compute, that’s all we need. I believe, as do others, that we need symbolic computation – the old-fashioned Cognitivism that Haugeland was interrogating – to bring discipline to statistical models. The work Yevick began with Holographic or Fourier Logic lays the ground for a more principled framework in which such questions can be considered.
Why We Need Yevick’s Ideas Now
Though the general distinction Yevick has called upon continues in some form (perhaps even in the ubiquitous System 1, System 2 distinction), Yevick’s contribution has been lost. She had begun the essential task of providing a formal explication of both poles and of the irreducible necessity for mechanisms appropriate to each. We need to recover her beginnings and extend and develop them.
Why? Because we are living in a post-ChatGPT world. Research into artificial intelligence began in the mid-1950s. By the mid-1990s computer systems were at long last able to beat the best human chess players. Now they are exhibiting language capacities that would have seemed astonishing only five years ago. Some thinkers are now claiming that we stand on the brink of some miraculous AGI (artificial general intelligence) that rivals human intelligence in all spheres. Among those, some believe that the machines will turn on us and destroy us. Other thinkers are deeply, and properly in my view, skeptical of such claims.
Make no mistake, we are now embroiled in a grand debate about computing technology and humanity’s future. Yes, the debate is replete with hype, bluster, and posturing, as such debates always are. Despite all that, the consequences really are of the deepest, broadest, and highest order.
I have spent a great deal of time exploring and sampling this debate over the past few years, and especially since the launch of GPT-3 in late summer of 2020 and then ChatGPT in late 2022, and writing about it as well. I have read technical articles, blog posts, journalistic treatments, tweets and treat streams. I have read things by the so-called Godfathers of AI – Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio – by critics such as Gary Marcus, Melanie Mitchell, and Emily Bender, by philosophers and digital humanists, by venture capitalists and executives, and who knows how many others. These words, these paragraphs, essays and reports, these polemics and technical expositions, all of them, are about the technology.
The debate is also about the human mind, implicitly and explicitly as well. The pursuit of artificial intelligence has been haunted by the human ever since Alan Turing proposed the “imitation game,” which has become known as the Turing Test: Is it a machine or is it human? The conception of human intelligence I see scurrying through these debates is impoverished. The account of human capabilities deployed in these discussions is not as sophisticated as that of machines.
I suppose one could lay this asymmetry at the feet of C. P. Snow’s infamous two cultures, science and engineering versus humanistic cultivation, and its institutionalization in our intellectual life. That may be a reason, but it is not an excuse, not in view of all the earnest palaver that has been devoted to it over the last half-century or more. We are on the brink of creating machines that think (if we have not done so already). We can no longer function coherently in the shadow of those old ideas. As far as I can tell, these current debates would keep us dancing in the dark even as they earnestly proclaim a new dispensation.
It is time we give serious consideration to the work of a woman who fled the Nazis halfway across Europe when she was 15, got a Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT when she was 23, corresponded with David Bohm in her late 20s, and during middle age, at the height of her career, was up teaching remedial math to housewives seeking to re-enter the workplace. I am not claiming that Miriam Lipschutz Yevick can show us the way forward into the light. But I am claiming that she is touch with something fundamental to the new understanding we need, we are seeking. Let us strike the match she has given us.
Next Year in Jerusalem, 2040
Yevick ends A Testament for Ariela with a speech she gave to Princeton students in 1970. The United States had started bombing Cambodia. Princeton students were staging protests in the university chapel and in front of the library, shouting “shut it down.” Yevick addressed the students who had gathered in front of the library, urging them “to respect and learn from the accumulate knowledge to be found there.” In the course of that speech she talked about
a global knowledge can evoke that “holographic awareness” which transcends its interpretation in the mechanical language of recurrent programs. It “holds compact in one” that global vision which continuously reinterprets reality in terms of lived experience. Thus you will assert your superior humanity and do better than the computer.
That is the only time that she used the word “holographic,” or any of its cognates, in the entire book.
I don’t know what Yevick would have thought about GPT-3, which was announced two years after she had died, nor do I know if she would have taken pleasure in experimenting with ChatGPT. I would like to think that her reactions would have been similar to mine, yes, this is remarkable technology portending a tantalizing future, but it has severe limitations as well.
In that spirit I presented part of her 1970 speech to ChatGPT, requesting it to recast that speech so that it is suitable for, say, 2040: “Climate change has gotten worse, though mitigation efforts have begun to succeed. We now have a permanent colony on the moon and are about to send a team to take up residence on Mars.” I also asked ChatGPT to imagine that Ariela was giving the speech. (She is a patent attorney, though I didn’t know that when I prompted ChatGPT.) Here is the speech it wrote; I have included Yevick’s original in Appendix 1:
Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed faculty, and my fellow students,
Today, as I stand before you in the year 2040, I find myself reflecting on the words of my grandmother, Miriam Yevick, who delivered a passionate speech to students at Princeton University in 1970. Her words still resonate deeply, but as we gather here today, we find ourselves in a world marked by both progress and profound challenges.
In 1970, my grandmother implored students to embrace knowledge from a myriad of disciplines, to read the world with empathy, imagination, and rational analysis. She spoke of a global awareness, a “holographic awareness” that transcends mere data and numbers. She believed that we, as humans, possessed the ability to understand and shape our world better than any computer.
Fast forward to 2040, and the world has indeed changed. Climate change, once a looming threat, has become a stark reality. But amidst this crisis, we have witnessed remarkable efforts to mitigate its effects. Renewable energy sources have replaced fossil fuels, and innovative technologies have transformed our cities into sustainable hubs of life.
In the spirit of my grandmother’s vision, we now have a permanent colony on the moon, and we stand on the precipice of sending a team to Mars to establish a new home among the stars. These achievements are a testament to our unwavering determination and our ability to come together as a global community to overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges.
Yet, even with these strides, we are acutely aware that our work is far from finished. Climate change remains a pressing issue, and we must continue our efforts to protect and preserve our planet. The knowledge my grandmother spoke of in 1970 is even more critical today. We must not only understand the complex systems of our world but also be prepared to address them with wisdom, compassion, and innovation.
As we look at the world through the lens of 2040, we see a society that has made progress, but we also see a miniature city, much like the dollhouse my grandmother envisioned. In every room and every mind, activities proceed, sometimes with purpose but often without a conscious connection to the larger scheme. It’s up to us to bridge these gaps, to make the connections, and to steer our collective actions toward a more sustainable and equitable future.
The problems we face are vast and diverse, but so too are our talents, our intellect, and our determination. We are the generation that will rise to the occasion. We have the knowledge, the technology, and the global awareness to build a better world for ourselves and for future generations.
In the words of Victor Hugo, “There is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come.” The time for change is now. Let us draw inspiration from the wisdom of the past, like my grandmother’s speech from 1970, and let us forge a path forward that leads us to a world where we not only survive but thrive, where we are stewards of our planet, and where we use our superior humanity to create a brighter future.
Thank you, and let us embark on this journey together with hope, determination, and a commitment to change.
Coda
Let me offer a closing observation. The phrase “Next Year in Jerusalem” (L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim) is sung or said at the end of the Seder and dates at least to the 15th century. Just what the phrase means, how it signifies, that has been and remains the subject of commentary and interpretation at the core of which is the desire to see the Temple in Jerusalem rebuilt. It had twice been destroyed, first in c. 587 BCE by the Babylonians and again in 70 CE by the Romans. However one elaborates and transforms that core, the phrase looks to a better future.
Hamas has said that their current attack on Israel was intended in part to defend the Aqsa Mosque, which is located on the 35-acre site where those temples had been located.
Appendix 1: Yevick’s 1970 Address to Students
This is not Yevick’s complete address as she has given it, but it is the portion that I gave to ChatGPT as part of the prompt:
You will have to know in depth the nature of a dozen disciplines: medicine, education, architecture, city planning, transportation, food production, the generation of power, pricing mechanisms, local administration, government organization. You will have to read the world both in fictional and mathematical terms: with empathy, the imaginative projection of one’s own consciousness into another human being, and with logic and rational analysis and lucidity and precision. You may come to stand above your society and epoch as one who views an immense doll house, a miniature city: in every room, in every street, in every mind the activities proceed, locally purposeful but not consciously connected to the larger scheme and often collectively random and destructive.
Such a global knowledge can evoke that “holographic awareness” which transcends its interpretation in the mechanical language of recurrent programs. It “holds compact in one” that global vision which continuously reinterprets reality in terms of lived experience. Thus you will assert your superior humanity and do better than the computer.
The world is there for you to rethink and redo. The problems are as numerous as the number of your brains. Your brains are young and vigorous; they will rise to the occasion! For “There is nothing as powerful,” as Victor Hugo said, “as an idea whose time has come.”
Appendix 2: What does ChatGPT know about Miriam Yevick?
On September 17, 2023, I asked ChatGPT about Miriam Yevick. It knew nothing. That did not surprise me. Though everything I know about her would have been on the web prior to the time it was trained, I do not know how much of that was in its training corpus – the content of various articles is behind paywalls. The fact is LLMs do not “remember” everything they are trained on. If something isn’t mentioned sufficiently often, whatever that is, it won’t register as an individual object of knowledge.
What do you know about Miriam Yevick, a mathematician?
I’m sorry, but I don’t have any specific information about a mathematician named Miriam Yevick in my database, and as of my last knowledge update in September 2021, she does not appear to be a widely recognized or publicly known figure in the field of mathematics. It’s possible that she may have become more prominent in the field or made significant contributions after my last knowledge update. If you have specific questions or would like information about a different mathematician or topic, please feel free to ask, and I’ll do my best to assist you.
You’re correct, she’s not well-known. She got her Ph.D. from MIT in 1947. She corresponded with the physicist, David Bohm, in the 1950s, and she published an interesting article in the journal, Pattern Recognition, in 1975, entitled Holographic or Fourier Logic. She also published a book of letters she wrote to her granddaughter, A Testament for Ariela.
Thank you for providing additional information about Miriam Yevick. While she may not be widely known in the broader mathematical community, it’s clear that she had an interesting and diverse set of interests and contributions. Her correspondence with physicist David Bohm and her work on “Holographic or Fourier Logic” in the journal Pattern Recognition suggest an engagement with interdisciplinary ideas.
Publishing a book of letters to her granddaughter, titled “A Testament for Ariela,” is a personal and unique contribution that highlights her broader interests and desire to connect with future generations.
If you have any specific questions or would like to know more about any aspect of Miriam Yevick’s work or life, please feel free to ask, and I’ll do my best to provide information based on the details you’ve provided.
She fled the Nazis in 1940 along with her parents. As you know, many Jews left Europe at that time.
Miriam Yevick’s experience of fleeing Europe with her parents in 1940 during World War II is a poignant reminder of the widespread displacement and persecution that many Jewish families and individuals faced during that time. The Holocaust and the policies of Nazi Germany forced millions of Jewish people to leave their homes and seek refuge in other countries to escape persecution and violence.
This historical context adds depth to her personal story and underscores the resilience of those who survived and managed to rebuild their lives in new places. If you have any more specific questions about Miriam Yevick’s life or her contributions, please feel free to ask, and I’ll provide information to the best of my ability based on the details you’ve provided.
Thank you, and thanks for not making stuff up.
You’re very welcome! Providing accurate and reliable information is a priority, and I’m here to assist with the information I have up to my last knowledge update. If you have any more questions or need information on any other topic in the future, don’t hesitate to reach out. I’m here to help!
However, a week and a half later, on September 29, 2023, I again queried ChatGPT about her. This time it offered a fair amount of information, all of it fabricated, though the fabrication is not without interest.
Why the difference? Perhaps it is because the earlier query was about “Miriam Yevick” while this one was about “Miriam Lipschutz Yevick.” Perhaps it’s because the earlier query took the form of a complete sentence while this prompt was simply a name. Or perhaps it was because the earlier query ran against the August 3rd version of the Chatster while this ran against the September 25th version. Who knows?
Miriam Lipschutz Yevick
Miriam Lipschutz Yevick (1910–2003) was a notable American physicist and mathematician known for her contributions to statistical mechanics, particularly her work in the field of lattice gases. She made significant contributions to the understanding of phase transitions and critical phenomena.
Miriam Yevick received her Ph.D. in mathematical physics from the University of Chicago in 1933. She was one of the early female physicists who made important contributions to the field at a time when it was predominantly male-dominated.
Her work in lattice gases and statistical mechanics was influential in the development of mathematical models for understanding phase transitions in gases and liquids. Her research contributed to the foundation of the lattice gas theory, which is an important area of statistical mechanics.
While her contributions to science were significant, Miriam Lipschutz Yevick’s work has not always received the recognition it deserved during her lifetime. Nevertheless, she remains an important figure in the history of physics and mathematics, especially for her pioneering work in statistical mechanics.
What about her work in holographic or Fourier logic?
I’m not aware of any specific work by Miriam Lipschutz Yevick in the fields of holographic logic or Fourier logic. Her primary contributions and recognition are in the field of statistical mechanics, particularly lattice gases and their applications to understanding phase transitions and critical phenomena.
It’s possible that she may have explored related areas or interdisciplinary topics during her career, but if there were significant contributions in holographic logic or Fourier logic, they might not be as widely documented or recognized as her work in statistical mechanics. If you have specific information or references to her work in these areas, please provide more context, and I’ll do my best to provide further information.
Oh, her Ph.D. was in mathematics and it was from MIT in 1947. She also corresponded with David Bohm on quantum mechanics.
Thank you for providing additional information about Miriam Lipschutz Yevick’s background and her correspondence with David Bohm on quantum mechanics. It’s important to note that my previous responses were based on general knowledge, and I didn’t have specific details about her background or correspondence in my database up to my last knowledge update in September 2021.
Miriam Lipschutz Yevick’s Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT in 1947 and her correspondence with David Bohm on quantum mechanics are significant aspects of her academic and scientific career. Correspondence with prominent scientists like David Bohm often indicates an active and engaged role in scientific discussions and research. Her contributions in the field of mathematics and her interactions with notable physicists like Bohm are valuable aspects of her legacy in science and mathematics. If you have more specific questions or would like to know more about her work in these areas, I’ll do my best to provide further information based on the details you’ve provided.