Reflections on Beckett: a centenary celebration

The essays in this collection were originally delivered as part of the Samuel Beckett lecture series at Trinity College Dublin, Samuel Beckett's alma mater. The contributors include eminent Beckett scholars such as Linda Ben-Zvi, Enoch Brater, Ruby Cohn and Stan Gontarski, theatre scholars such as Herbert Blau and Joseph Roach, practitioners such as the Irish actor, Barry McGovern, and cultural critics such as Marina Warner and Terry Eagleton. The collection sheds new light on Beckett's enigmatic theater, offering new perspectives on Beckett's use of language and silence, on his attitudes toward the body, on those who influenced him and on those he has influenced (including Suzan-Lori Parks and Femi Osofisan), and on Beckett and the art of self-collaboration. Each contributor places the playwright into a network of genealogies and legacies and his work into important historical, cultural, and aesthetic contexts. Together, the essays demonstrate Beckett's impact on theater, performance, and visual arts during the latter half of the twentieth century and serve to open up new directions for Beckett studies.

100 years on: a century of genetics

In 2006 we celebrated the centenary of a remarkable year that saw the birth of genetics as a scientific discipline. This birth had its origins in horticulture and was supervised by a remarkable Cambridge academic, accompanied by a loyal group of female colleagues who worked together in underfunded conditions with little institutional support. Despite this deprivation, they established the foundations of an ongoing revolution, with huge academic and commercial consequences that we can recognize today in the shape of genomics and its application to biomedicine.

Synthesised design of optical filters assisted by microcomputer

New algorithms and microcomputer-programs for generating original multilayer designs (and printing a spectral graph) from refractive-index input are presented. The programs are characterised TSHEBYSHEV, HERPIN, MULTILAYER-SPECTRUM and have originated new designs of narrow-stopband, non-polarizing edge, and Tshebyshev optical filter. Computation procedure is an exact synthesis (so far that is possible) numerical refinement not having been needed.

In the intersection of the angles of a table, there is more truth than in all the tangle of muscles: Futurism as anti-humanist critique

The recent celebrations of the centenary of the publication of the Futurist manifesto led to a renewed discussion of the ideas and artworks of the Italian artists’ group. Jacques Rancière related the Futurist ethos with the modernist project of liberating art from representation. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, in his post-Futurist manifesto, also identified a historical irony at play in the emptying out of Futurism’s promise: a liberated mechanical humanity did indeed materialize, in a global economic system premised on financial servitude to the future via debt. However, these models continue to assess Futurism against an unchallenged humanism, finding it either supporting ideals of freedom and human rights despite itself, or else lacking in these areas. But Futurism is potentially more relevant than ever not in spite of its anti-humanist agenda, precisely because of it. Tom McCarthy annexes not Futurist art but Futurist writing to an emerging object oriented ontology that seeks to challenge the primacy of the human. If Futurism is to be repurposed as a critical concept, it can only do so by countering the humanist myth the liberal subject that underlies the current cultural and political hegemony of neo-liberalism.

The cloud chamber and CTR Wilson’s legacy to atmospheric science

2011 is the centenary year of the short paper (Wilson,1911) first describing the cloud chamber, the device for visualising high-energy charged particles which earned the Scottish physicist Charles Thomas Rees (‘CTR’) Wilson the 1927 Nobel Prize for physics. His many achievements in atmospheric science, some of which have current relevance, are briefly reviewed here. CTR Wilson’s lifetime of scientific research work was principally in atmospheric electricity at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge; he was Reader in Electrical Meteorology from 1918 and Jacksonian Professor from 1925 to 1935. However, he is immortalised in physics for his invention of the cloud chamber, because of its great significance as an early visualisation tool for particles such as cosmic rays1 (Galison, 1997). Sir Lawrence Bragg summarised its importance:

Turing, Kasparov and the future

The 'Turing 100' Conference in Manchester was the main event of the Turing Centenary Year in 2012. This is a report and reflection on Kasparov's popular talk. Within it, he explained how Turing and influenced computer chess, his career and the chess community. Kasparov also played Chessbase's 'TURING' emulation of Turing's second paper chess engine, here labelled 'AT2'. Quasi Turing-tests, computer contributions to world championship chess, and suspected cheating in chess are also mentioned.

Bernard Spencer: essays on his poetry & life

15 chapters by separate hands, an introduction, and updated bibliography publishing proceedings from the 2009 Bernard Spencer Centenary Conference at the University of Reading, along with other related work.

The selected poetry and prose of Vittorio Sereni

2013 centenary corrected paperback edition of a 2006 publication, with introduction, co-translations, and notes