My dad was a mathematical logician, one of the key minds in IBM’s heyday, an expert on modal logic and its data processing applications. What many of his colleagues didn’t know is that the barrel-chested wisecracking guy with the Liverpudlian accent in the office next door was an entirely self-taught man.
Fortunately for him, he had a connection, from wartime service in the RAF, to one of the greatest minds in post-war computing: Ted Codd, the man who invented relational databases and without whom there would be no artificial intelligence. (Decades later, Codd’s IBM patents were sold to Oracle, enabling Larry Ellison to build a data empire.)
There was no GI Bill in the U.K. My dad did a double external degree in applied mathematics and applied physics at the University of London in an astonishing eighteen months, commuting by train from the Birkenhead bartending gig he had during the week. In those days if you simply passed the exam, they gave you a...
Brendan Howley spent a decade covering covert operations and white-collar crime for The Fifth Estate. He co-invented HUME, a context software engine.
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