Ray's Life

Biography and Pictures
This is a Work in Progress ...

Ray Solomonoff and the New Probability Enlarged version of Springer Article.
More recent corrected version coming soon.

Some Ray quotes and notes:

``The goal I set grew out of my early interest in science and mathematics. I found that while the discoveries of the past were interesting to me, I was even more interested in how people discovered things. Was there a general technique to solve all mathematical problems? Was there a general method by which scientists could discover all scientific truths?”(From ``The Discovery of Algorithmic Complexity'')

Ray and brother George — Ray (on left) and his brother George

Ray on a pony — Ray on a horsie

family portrait, Ray on left — Ray in high school, family portrait

Ray student ID — Ray Student ID 1050-1951
Ray had amazing teachers at UChicago. Nicholas Rashevsky, founded the field of Mathematical Biology, 1936. Anatole Rapoport, in 1948, wrote about connectivity in nets (including neural) and wrote two papers with Ray (1950). Enrico Fermi’s students taught Nuclear Physics to Ray from their compendium of Fermi’s notes (Titled Unclear Notes). Rudolf Carnap was Ray’s professor of philosophy. Carnap tried to figure out how to describe everything in the entire universe, including itself, by a long digital string. Ray's solution led to Algorithmic Probability.

Int Cong of Mathemations 1950 — International Congress of Mathematicians 1950, at Harvard. Ray attended, and ``The Structure of Random Nets'', by Anatole Rapoport and him is in the proceedings. Many great mathematicians gave talks: Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, William Feller, Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann, Alfred Tarski, Abraham Robinson, Laurent Schwartz.
Can you find Ray? Click the picture to explore!
(Hint, look at Student ID, then look about 36.7% way in from left side, 60% up from bottom.[we think])

Ray, Boyleston St., Harvard Sq., 1960s

Ray at Boscone 1960s — Science Fiction influenced early AI scientists. Ray was President of the newly formed Science Fiction Club at UChicago in 1950. Science Fiction Conventions had already begun ten years before. Here is a later view (probably) of a Sci Fi convention in the 1960s, with Jerry Lettvin, Ray and Maggie Lettvin

Ray and Marvin Minsky — Ray and Marvin Minsky, maybe in 2000

NIPS Conference — Neural Information Processing Systems Conferece Dec. 14, 2002, Whistler, B.C., Canada

NKS Conference, Oct. 2005 — First Day at Midwest New Kind of Science 2005 Conference October 2005

At NKS Conference — Ray giving keynote address at New Kind of Science Conference, 2005. Click on picture to view the lecture

Ray at AI@50 — At the AI@50 Conference, 2006

Ray inventing a drink — Ray in Secret Trovaxo Laboratory developing the Liquid Helium Zonk

testing a drink — Our Senior Development Team Putting Secret Trovaxo beverage experiments to rigorous testing.
(Click on picture for more.)