I know he has a place in the early history of Scheme, but even then he was rejecting it, I think. But if you look at his website, <https://professorhewitt.blogspot.com/> , or his recent papers it just seems like you are looking at the work of someone who is unable to find, or unwilling to work with, an editor.
Which makes it hard to make heads or tails of his recent work, especially when he is throwing around phrases like disproving Godelian Incompletness or Actors being black boxes that behave in ways analogous to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and in the meantime attaching himself to Erlang.
Is this just normal behaviour for emeriti?
I met him once at an Erlang conference in SF where he have a bizarre closing speech which managed to touch on NSA surveillance, the Godel thing, and a proposed new distributed internet with very detailed Erlang implementation specifications.
Old dude is just off his rocker. He walked around with a utility belt and a keychain with like 30 keys dangling off of it.
2 here we go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-0WJ_COvBY
It was entertaining to watch and I definitely agree with the sentiment, but it was weird.
For what it's worth I love this kind of person, God bless him. Mad scientist type.
>>3
It's just very strange. I had a P-Chem prof who got really into the whole 'quantum physics therefore God' thing and I searched for him on YouTube and there is the guy who taught us about symmetry groups and quantum wave functions and spectra speaking at all these New Age conferences and spreading quantum woo. That is kind of how I imagine Carl Hewitt's students might think about it- except that my prof is not (or was not) speaking at chemistry conferences.
It's always upsetting when someone who was at one point an intelligent professor completely and utterly loses it. I was not aware that he had ended up this way.