Even still, it would have been a mistake to interpret their tame veneer as capitulation, or even apathy; they knew that one way or another, change was coming—historic change—and they were willing to be patient.

The complexity of the human brain dwarfs that of anything else in the known universe, but it’s almost belied by the sheer elegance of its construction.

It must have been obvious even from a distance that the traditional hierarchy of parent and child was absent between us, as he carried himself more like a peer than a father, unburdened by paternal neuroses. And although I could tell he was happy to share the experiences of our outings with me, the sheer intensity of his focus—as joyful as it was

My efforts, she taught me, weren’t in the service of my teachers, or an ideology, or even some disembodied sense of principle. They were for me.

Like any adolescent prone to seeing life as a melodrama, I might have found it easy to convince myself I was alone in my struggle against China’s gender norms.

It was a reminder that the best work is often done in the shared spaces of science as a whole—global collaborations that dance over boundaries without hesitation—rather than within the bubbles of our own fields.

Although Rumelhart was the lead researcher, it was Geoff Hinton, one of his two coauthors, who would become the figure most associated with backpropagation.

If there’s a silver lining to periods of such opacity, however, when the world seems all but closed to scientific inquiry, it’s that the curious among us are at their most inventive.

“knowledge engineering,”