Historia magistra vitae: history as education for life in early modern Spain

Curriculum Vitae Languages Spoken Education

Academic Interests Group theory and combinatorics (in particular groups acting on rooted trees, growth of groups, regular combings of groups, random walks on groups, and dynamical systems) Dynamical Systems (in particuliar iteration of holomorphic maps). Computer algebra and computational group theory

My AI or Five Theses About Artificial Intelligence After Its 50 th Birthday

In a search for lessons learned from 50 years of history of AI, this paper presents a brief, subjective and personal history of the field. It then introduces five theses-prescriptions for what makes good AI research. The theses stem form the author’s understanding of successes and failures of the field, and from his own experience as a long-standing and active member of the AI community. The fi...

„The education and training of gentry sons in early modern England‟, Social History (forthcoming)

This paper explores the education and training received by the sons of the English gentry in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Using information from the herald‟s visitations of four counties, it offers quantitative evidence of the proportion of gentry children who entered university, spent time at one of the inns of court or became apprentices in London. We find that over the perio...

Early Life and Education

Healing Virtue: Saludadores versus Witches in Early Modern Spain

Said one devil: ‘‘To see good people, look at the saludadores, who . . . claim they do possess virtue.’’ They took offence and said that it was true that they possessed it. And to this replied [another] devil: ‘‘How can it be that virtue is found in wanderers who do naught but blow?’’ The absence of any clear dividing line between the fields of medicine and religion in early modern Spain become...