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Who is Bret Victor?



A bay area resident who has several thoughtful writings and talks about human computer interaction and more recently a piece on global climate change. AFAIK he is unemployed so he has lots of free time to work on personal projects which may be inspired by the readings on his bookshelf.


He's one of the PI-like people at the CDG.

(http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046437/5-steps-to-recreate-xero...)


Thanks for the link. But what do you mean by "PI-like people"? I can't match that acronym to anything off-hand.


I'm guessing Principal Investigator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator


Primary investigator-like people.

Like, he hires researchers to work under him.


Probably refers to "PI", the 1998 movie written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. The main character was an eccentric mathematician who was obsessed with patterns in the decimal expansion of the transcendal number pi. If you have not seen the movie I would encourage you to look for it as my summary is not adequate.


No, I'm afraid not. He didn't seem incredibly eccentric to me, anyhow, just a ridiculously hard worker


Thanks I was wondering how he would stay unemployed with his reputation and prior experiences at Apple :)


This is how I know him, a talk that every dev should at least know about. It is about live/realtime coding and has some pretty jaw-dropping demos.

"Inventing on Principle"

https://vimeo.com/36579366


That was 54 minutes well spent...thanks!



Looks like he's trying to reinvent math as a drawing program instead of complex notation.

Or rather that is the least common multiple of everything on that site.





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