Valentin Turchin
| Valentin Fyodorovich Turchin | |
|---|---|
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Turchin in 1977
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| Native name | Валентин Фёдорович Турчин |
| Born |
February 14, 1931 Podolsk, USSR |
| Died | April 7, 2010 (aged 79) Oakland, New Jersey |
| Citizenship |
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| Nationality | Russian |
| Fields | cybernetics, computer science |
| Institutions | |
| Alma mater | Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics |
| Known for |
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| Children | Peter Turchin |
Valentin Fyodorovich Turchin (Russian: Валенти́н Фёдорович Турчи́н, 14 February 1931 in Podolsk – 7 April 2010 in Oakland, New Jersey) was a Soviet and American cybernetician and computer scientist. He developed the Refal programming language, the theory of metasystem transitions and the notion of supercompilation. He was as a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence and a proponent of the global brain hypothesis.
Turchin was born in 1931 in Podolsk, Soviet Union. In 1952, he graduated from Moscow University in Theoretical Physics, and got his Ph.D. in 1957. After working on neutron and solid-state physics at the Institute for Physics of Energy in Obninsk, in 1964 he accepted a position at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics in Moscow. There he worked in statistical regularization methods and authored REFAL, one of the first AI languages and the AI language of choice in the Soviet Union.
In the 1960s, Turchin became politically active. In Fall 1968, he wrote the pamphlet The Inertia of Fear, which was quite widely circulated in samizdat, the writing began to be circulated under the title The Inertia of Fear: Socialism and Totalitarianism in Moscow from 1976. Following its publication in the underground press, he lost his research laboratory. In 1970 he authored "The Phenomenon of Science", a grand cybernetic meta-theory of universal evolution, which broadened and deepened the earlier book. By 1973, Turchin had founded the Moscow chapter of Amnesty International with Andrey Tverdokhlebov and was working closely with the well-known physicist and Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. In 1974 he lost his position at the Institute, and was persecuted by the KGB. Facing almost certain imprisonment, he and his family were forced to emigrate from the Soviet Union in 1977.
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