Hunter College Audience Enthralled
By Dr. Pola Rosen
Before a large and enthusiastic audience recently, cultural icons Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein appeared as the first speakers in the Hunter College Writing Center’s 2012 “Great Thinkers Of Our Time” series.
Pinker, who is married to Goldstein, led off by speaking about the evolution of his career and his latest work, in which he suggests that there is less violence in the world today than in the past 2,000 years. Goldstein then briefly talked about how the two had met and about her own evolution as a writer from mathematician, to philosopher, to novelist. Goldstein is the author of many books, the most recent of which is “36 Arguments for the Existence of God … A Work of Fiction.”
Last year in the series’ debut at Hunter, the Writing Center and its director, Lewis Burke Frumkes, had showcased the likes of physicist/futurist Freeman Dyson, Harvard’s renowned Howard Gardner, feminist pioneer Carol Gilligan, and Nobel Prize in physics winner Frank Wilczeck, establishing the series as one of the premiere intellectual venues anywhere.
Pinker and Goldstein will be followed by John Donoghue, the head of Brown University’s Institute for Brain Research, Seth Lloyd the Quantum Computer Engineer and author of “Programming the Universe” from MIT, and Harvard physicist and theorist Lisa Randall who is also an expert on the Great Hadron Collider. #
