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Mark Levinson | |
|---|---|
| Alma mater | Brown University University of California, Berkeley |
| Known for | Particle Fever |
Mark A. Levinson is an American film director. He directed the 2013 documentary Particle Fever and the 2019 documentary The Bit Player .
Levinson earned a Bachelor of Science degree at Brown University. He received a Ph.D. in physics in 1983 at the University of California, Berkeley. [1] Thereafter, he moved into a career in film and television. [2]
Serving as director of Particle Fever, Levinson told the story of the experimental discovery of the Higgs boson. The film covers the scientific process and the scientists behind the research. He wanted to show science in a realistic and appealing way. In 2007, he met with future co-producer David Kaplan, who had been toying with the idea for a science documentary on the Large Hadron Collider. [3]
He served in various sound production roles, including ADR supervisor in various films and television shows, with 39 credits from 1988 to 2013, including Se7en , The English Patient , The Talented Mr. Ripley , Cold Mountain and House of Cards .
He is the writer/producer/director of the fiction film Prisoner of Time, which examined the lives of former Russian dissident artists after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The film was acclaimed during its premiere at the Moscow International Film Festival. [4]
In 2016, Levinson was working on a film adaptation of Richard Powers' novel The Gold Bug Variations . [5]
In 2016 he was awarded the inaugural Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication for Particle Fever.
In 2019, in partnership with the IEEE Information Theory Society, he completed a documentary The Bit Player about Claude Shannon, "The Father of Information Theory." [6]
In 2020 he was awarded the inaugural NEST Robert E. Sievers Leonardo da Vinci Award for work at the intersection of art and science
The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communication. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represented as either "1" or "0", but other representations such as true/false, yes/no, on/off, or +/− are also widely used.
Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, cryptographer and inventor known as the "father of information theory" and as the "father of the Information Age". Shannon was the first to describe the Boolean gates that are essential to all digital electronic circuits, and was one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence. Shannon is credited with laying the foundations of the Information Age.
Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information. The field was established and put on a firm footing by Claude Shannon in the 1940s, though early contributions were made in the 1920s through the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley. It is at the intersection of electronic engineering, mathematics, statistics, computer science, neurobiology, physics, and electrical engineering.
Quantum information is the information of the state of a quantum system. It is the basic entity of study in quantum information theory, and can be manipulated using quantum information processing techniques. Quantum information refers to both the technical definition in terms of Von Neumann entropy and the general computational term.
Robert Gray Gallager is an American electrical engineer known for his work on information theory and communications networks.
Nima Arkani-Hamed is an Iranian-American-Canadian theoretical physicist, with interests in high-energy physics, quantum field theory, string theory, cosmology and collider physics. Arkani-Hamed is a member of the permanent faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is also director of the Carl P. Feinberg Cross-Disciplinary Program in Innovation at the Institute and director of The Center for Future High Energy Physics (CFHEP) in Beijing, China.
Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp was a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Berlekamp was widely known for his work in computer science, coding theory and combinatorial game theory.
What the Bleep Do We Know!? is a 2004 American pseudo-scientific film that posits a spiritual connection between quantum physics and consciousness. The plot follows the fictional story of a photographer, using documentary-style interviews and computer-animated graphics, as she encounters emotional and existential obstacles in her life and begins to consider the idea that individual and group consciousness can influence the material world. Her experiences are offered by the creators to illustrate the film's scientifically unsupported ideas.
John Robinson Pierce, was an American engineer and author. He did extensive work concerning radio communication, microwave technology, computer music, psychoacoustics, and science fiction. Additionally to his professional career he wrote science fiction for many years using the names John Pierce, John R. Pierce, and J. J. Coupling. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he earned his PhD from Caltech, and died in Sunnyvale, California, from complications of Parkinson's Disease.
David S. Slepian was an American mathematician. He is best known for his work with algebraic coding theory, probability theory, and distributed source coding. He was colleagues with Claude Shannon and Richard Hamming at Bell Labs.
The Claude E. Shannon Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society was created to honor consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory. Each Shannon Award winner is expected to present a Shannon Lecture at the following IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory. It is a prestigious prize in information theory, covering technical contributions at the intersection of mathematics, communication engineering, and theoretical computer science. It is the highest honor given by the IEEE Information Theory Society and is also regarded as the highest award in the entire field of information theory.
The mathematical expressions for thermodynamic entropy in the statistical thermodynamics formulation established by Ludwig Boltzmann and J. Willard Gibbs in the 1870s are similar to the information entropy by Claude Shannon and Ralph Hartley, developed in the 1940s.
George Fitzgerald Smoot III is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, Nobel laureate, and the second contestant to win the $1 million prize on Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer with John C. Mather that led to the "discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation".
The IEEE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award is a Technical Field Award that was established by the IEEE Board of Directors in 2008. This award may be presented for outstanding contributions to the field of nuclear and plasma sciences and engineering. This award may be presented to an individual, individuals on a team, or up to three multiple recipients. Recipients of this award receive a bronze medal, certificate, and honorarium. This award was presented for the first time in 2011.
Solving chess consists of finding an optimal strategy for the game of chess; that is, one by which one of the players can always force a victory, or either can force a draw. It is also related to more generally solving chess-like games such as Capablanca chess and infinite chess. In a weaker sense, solving chess may refer to proving which one of the three possible outcomes is the result of two perfect players, without necessarily revealing the optimal strategy itself.
Barry Clark Barish is an American experimental physicist and Nobel Laureate. He is a Linde Professor of Physics, emeritus at California Institute of Technology and a leading expert on gravitational waves.
Particle Fever is a 2013 American documentary film tracking the first round of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. The film follows the experimental physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) who run the experiments, as well as the theoretical physicists who attempt to provide a conceptual framework for the LHC's results. The film begins in 2008 with the first firing of the LHC and concludes in 2012 with the successful identification of the Higgs boson.
The Bit Player is a 2019 documentary film created to celebrate the 2016 centenary of the birth of Claude Shannon, the "father of information theory". The film was produced and directed by Mark Levinson, in cooperation with the IEEE Information Theory Society and the IEEE Foundation.