John Holland

First Ph.D. in computer science, ever; one of the inventors of evolutionary computation, more particularly genetic algorithms; one of the Middle-Aged Turks at the Santa Fe Institute.

I first learned about John Holland browsing in a bookstore; Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems had just come out in its second edition, with a cover which was more striking than it has any right to be, and was cheap (for a technical book), so I bought it. I spent the next half a year working my way through it --- not because it was badly written or unclear (quite the reverse), but because it I was way out of my depth statistically. By the time he came to speak in Madison I thought I understood it pretty well, and <brag>he even said the questions I asked after his talk were ``very good'' ones,</brag> and I got him to sign my copy of Adaptation. He is, in short, one of my scientific idols, and one of the best people ever to put pen to papyrus on the subjects of adaptation and learning. (Though his fondness for the phrase ``complex adaptive systems'' baffles me.)

Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems
Emergence: From Chaos to Order [Review: Game Rules, or, Emergence According to Holland, or, Confessions of a Creative Reductionist]
Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity [Has a math-free explanation of genetic algorithms. I'm not entirely happy with what he has to say about economics]
and Keith Holyoak, Richard Nisbett and Paul Thagard, Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning and Discovery [Review: The Best-Laid Schemes o' Mice an' Men]

Festschrift in Honor of John H. Holland; abstracts, with links to full text of some papers

Notebooks

John Holland