Piergiorgio Odifreddi
Piergiorgio Odifreddi (born 13 July 1950, in Cuneo) is an Italian mathematician, logician, aficionado of the history of science, and popular science writer and essayist, especially on philosophical atheism as a member of the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics. He is philosophically and politically near to Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky. Early life and education. Born in Cuneo in the Piedmont region, he received his "Laurea" "cum laude" in mathematics in Turin in 1973. He then specialized in the United States at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and UCLA from 1978 and 1980, and  in the Soviet Union at Novosibirsk State University in 1982 and 1983. Teaching career. From 1983 to 2007, he taught logic at the University of Turin, and from 1985 to 2003 he was visiting professor at Cornell University, where he collaborated with Anil Nerode, Richard Platek, and Richard Shore. From 2001 to 2003 he taught at "Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele", which was founded by Luigi Maria Verzé. He has been visiting professor at Monash University in Melbourne in 1988, the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing in 1992 and in 1995, the "Università di Nanchino" in 1998, Buenos Aires  University in 2001 and the "Italian Academy" at Columbia University in 2006. His main field of research was computability theory, a branch of mathematical logic that studies the class of functions that can be calculated automatically. In this field he has published about thirty articles, and the two-volume book "Classical Recursion Theory" (North Holland Elsevier, 1989 and 1999), which has become a seminal text on the subject. Writing. He has written editorials and books reviews for "La rivista dei libri" (the Italian edition of the New York Review of Books), is a regular contributor to "Le Scienze" (the Italian  edition of Scientific American), and has also written for several newspapers such as La Repubblica, La Stampa and the weekly L'Espresso. The television stations "Radio Tre", "RAI Due" and "RAI Tre" have hosted many of his discussions on various scientific topics. He has written many popular books about logic, mathematics, geometry and other scientific topics, usually ranging on a wide variety of topics, including phylosophy and literature. He has also written several books on politics and against Christianity. Political views. Odifreddi was heavily influenced by Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky. He repeatedly manifested his opposition to US policies, in particular  against that of George W. Bush and Israel, as indicated in his writings "Non siamo tutti americani", "La dannata Terra Santa" and the controversial "Intervista a Hitler", in his book "Il matematico impertinente". His views on Israel "immodestly inspired" by José Saramago and Noam Chomsky caused protests, which led to the deletion of an editorial he wrote in his blog at la Repubblica on November 2012, where he talked about the Israeli incursion in the Gaza Strip. In protest of the censorship, he decided to close his blog with a bitter post, eventually re-opening it years later. Radio and  television. Odifreddi had over 400 TV appearances in Italy, the most notable being: Other activities. Piergiorgio Odifreddi participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project in 2007.