Saul Gorn

Saul Gorn (10 November 1912 – 22 February 1992) was a pioneer in computer and information science who was a member of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania for more than 30 years. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) presented him its Distinguished Service Award for 1974.

Sourced

• Universal coding for computers is sought that uses relative addresses and a pseudocode and that assembles and translates, printing out a directory of final addresses of key commands, variables, and constants.
  • Saul Gorn (1954) Planning Universal Semi-Automatic Coding

• A man spends the first year of his life learning that he ends at his own skin, and the rest of his life learning that he doesn't.
  • "The Individual and Political Life of Information Systems", in Heilprin, Markuson, and Goodman, ed., Proceedings of the Symposium on Education for Information Science, Warrenton, Virginia, September 7-10, 1965 (Washington, DC: Spartan Books, 1965)

• Teaching is a personal matter of the nursery of the mind and should not be on public display.
  • Attributed to Saul Gorn in: National Association of Educational Broadcasters (1968) Educational Broadcasting Review Vol 2. p. 32; Article "Teaching As A Private Process"

• Before I begin speaking, there is something I would like to say
  • Attributed to Saul Gorn in: John G. Gammack et al. (2011) The Book of Informatics. p. 5

Self-Annihilating Sentences, 1992

Saul Gorn (1985/92) "Self-Annihilating Sentences: Saul Gorn's Compendium of Rarely Used Clichés", University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MS-CIS-85-0, January 1985; reissued in memoriam as No. MS-CIS-92-25, March 1992. (An unsourced collection of oxymoronic and tautological quotes.)

• Only unsolvable problems are worthy of artificial intelligence.
  • p. 1

• If you think about it long enough, you'll see that it's obvious.
  • p. 2; Cited in: Benjamin C. Pierce (2002) Types and programming languages. p. 313

• It's amazing how we can do things simultaneously, like talking and not listening.
  • p. 11

• This fact is clear to those who know it.
  • p. 11

• If you expect to sell what you make, you must also fabricate information about it.
  • p. 11

• Science vs. Technology: We should know why things must act as they do, to make them act as we want them to.
  • p. 14

About Saul Gorn

• Saul Gorn, an authority on machine oi automated language who has expanded his interests from the use of the computer foi information storage and retrieval to the broader topic of the "'information pollution" and an examination of the forces which contribute to it...
  • National Association of Educational Broadcasters (1968) Educational Broadcasting Review Vol 2. p. 32; Article "Teaching As A Private Process"

• The term "informatics" was first defined by Saul Gorn of University of Pennsylvania in 1983 (Gorn, 1983) as computer science plus information science used in conjunction with the name of a discipline such as business administration or biology. It denotes an application of computer science and information science to the management and processing of data, information and knowledge in the named discipline.
  • Paul Griffiths (2006) Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Intellectual Capital and Knowledge Management. p.129

External links

• "Saul Gorn", in John A. N. Lee, International Biographical Dictionary of Computer Pioneers, 1995, ISBN 1884964478, pp. 342–348