Paul Ginsparg

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Paul Ginsparg is a physicist widely known for his development of the ArXiv.org e-print archive. Since 2001, he has been a professor of Physics and Computing & Information Science at Cornell University. The pre-print archive was developed while he was a member of staff of Los Alamos National Laboratory, 1990–2001.

He has been awarded the P.A.M. (physics astronomy math) Award from the Special Libraries Association, named a Lingua Franca "Tech 20", elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, received the Council of Science Editors Award for Meritorious Achievement, and received the Paul Evans Peters Award from Educause, ARL, and CNI.

He has published physics papers in the areas of quantum field theory, string theory, conformal field theory, and quantum gravity.

[edit] Quotation?

An amusing quotation which is often attributed to Ginsparg runs like this:

"The problem with the global village is all the global village idiots."

But according to Ginsparg, this saying originated in the early 1980s as a remark by another well-known physicist, Sidney Coleman, in response to an email from a mutual acqaintance. A decade later, when the rest of the world began to discover the Internet, Ginsparg began to employ this quotation in e-mailed responses to inquiring reporters, a practice which inevitably led to the misattribution. In 1996, Ginsparg emailed Coleman from New Mexico, asking whether the record should be corrected. Coleman responded: "I know nothing of the origin of the global-village-idiot aphorism, nor about the Roswell incident either."

[edit] See also

• eprints (co)-authored by Ginsparg at arXiv.org
• Is Eternal Vigilance the Price of Freedom? (or Revenge of the Global Village Idiots), a forthcoming invited address by Ginsparg at Wikimania 2006, Cambridge, MA, August 4-6, 2006. NOTE: talk was cancelled due to controversial content.
• Read as We May audio for a talk at the Emerging Libraries Conference at Rice University, March 6th, 10:30-11:30AM.