Thinkers I Admire

Ada Lovelace

"The first computer programmer."

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"A century before the dawn of the computer age, Ada Lovelace imagined the modern-day, general-purpose computer. It could be programmed to follow instructions, she wrote in 1843. It could not just calculate but also create, as it 'weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.'"

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The computer she was writing about, the British inventor Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, was never built. But her writings about computing have earned Lovelace — []— recognition as the first computer programmer." -- The New York Times

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Mary Oliver

Image Credit Molly Malone Cook 

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Poet

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"Habit is that peculiar life-force that both obscures and illuminates the crucial difference between routine and ritual. “We are spinning our own fates, good or evil,” William James wrote more than a century ago in his timeless treatise on the subject. But the greatest meditation on habit I’ve ever encountered comes not from the legendary psychologist and philosopher but from a most beloved poet: Mary Oliver (b. September 10, 1935), who knows a great deal about the habits of heart and mind that both help us be fully alive and make sense of loss."--Maria Popova in The Marginalian

Karen Blixen

Author

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“Up in this air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.”
-- Isak Dinesen

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Dora Maar

Image Credit: Cecil Beaton Dora Maar behind one of her works, in her studio at 6 rue de Savoie, Paris 1944 Musée Picasso (Paris, France) © The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s

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"An artist in her own right."

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"Maar’s Surrealist photos, her best-known work, use the full range of her skills—especially darkroom techniques—combined with the new freedom of imagination and the loosened expectation of logical causality that Surrealism allowed its practitioners. Most of the examples are collages, re-photographed to remove them from the realm of handiwork. This gives the pictures a smooth, distanced surface, drawing on photography’s implied verisimilitude to convey a dreamlike uncanniness, a cognitive ambiguity.

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One of Maar’s most affecting reshot photo-collages is Le Simulateur (The Pretender), 1935. To create it, she used one of her Barcelona street photos, which features three young boys hanging out on the street. One of them—bent sharply backward, feet over head, but supported upright somehow—seems to be walking up a wall. For the new photograph Maar excises this figure and places his feet on the ground in a torqued, claustrophobic stone hallway. The architectural structure is a detail from an old photographic print of the Palace of Versailles, and the mood evoked is one of barely contained hysteria. “Hysteria” is no longer used as a term for a specific psychiatric condition, but the Surrealists were especially fond of the concept—seeing it as a useful tool (rather like automatism or dreaming) and a portal to another state of reality. Hysteria was, for them, something to be cultivated rather than cured." by Richard Kalina for Art News

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Thich Nhat Hanh

Image Credit: "Thich Nhat Hanh, shown in an undated photo at his Plum Village monastery in France, introduced ways to meditate that anyone could master Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism"

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Buddhist Monk, Poet, Teacher, Author, Founder

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"In the West, Nhat Hanh is sometimes called the father of mindfulness. He famously taught that we could all be bodhisattvas by finding happiness in the simple things—in mindfully peeling an orange or sipping tea. “A Buddha is someone who is enlightened, capable of loving and forgiving,” he wrote in Your True Home, one of more than 70 books he has authored." BY AIDYN FITZPATRICK / HUE, VIETNAM

Peter Drucker

"Management Thinker"

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"Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes." -- Peter Drucker