Featured Speaker: Keith Devlin, Stanford University Emeritus; Mathematician in Residence, Sonoma State University

With the growth of the Internet in the 1980s (the Web was launched in 1991, Google was still ten years in the future), researchers were trying to come to grips with the concept of “information.” Though the term “information technology” had been introduced back in 1958, there was no agreed definition of “information", and no formal theories to guide development of those new technologies. In 1987, I was invited to join a large, multi-disciplinary research group at Stanford University that was created in 1983 to try to develop a mathematically-grounded theory of information. (Perhaps something akin to physics, which provides a mathematically-grounded basis for engineering, or chemistry and biology that support health care and medicine.) The project provides a good illustration of the way mathematics can be developed and used to understand, and act in, a changing world.