Honorary Doctorate for Robert J. Sawyer

[Jonathan Post]

Dear Dr. Robert J. Sawyer,

Congratulations!  [copy of press release below on your Honorary PhD].

You and I (and Carolyn) last spoke together at last year's LA Worldcon
and at Westercon 57.  You were planning to mention me to Google, for
my 4 decades of working at the intersection of professional science
and Science Fiction.  I was going to tell you more about the Science
Fiction Convention within Science Conference that I ran in Boston 2006
(Dave Brin, Stan Schmidt, Mary Turzillo, Marvin Minsky, Geoff Landis,
John Forbes Nash Jr. et al at the 6th International Conference on
Complex Systems, ICCS-2006).

This year I am on the Executive Committee of ICCS-2007, tasked with
the Plenary Sessions, and working hard behind the scenes to get stars
and superstars from around the world.  Have to get further along with
Plenary before I follow-up on Science Fiction.  ICCS-2008 will
probably be in Europe or Australia.

I adore Science and Mathematics, and spend a good fraction of my time working
collaboratively with other mathematicians and scientists on research
that gets published in peer reviewed journals and conference
proceedings. That includes Mathematical Physics, Cosmology,
Mathematical Biology, and Mathematical Economics.

Starting later this month, I'll be teaching Math at a bottom-ranked
high school summer school in a deeply dysfunctional school district.
Those kids need to learn Math correctly: from someone who knows it,
does it every day, and loves it.

Do the techniques I used for 5 semesters teaching Math to university
students, some taking the same class the 2nd or 3rd time, applicable
to helping younger students, mostly poor, Hispanic, and
African-American?

I'll let you know by the end of August how this experiment worked out.

Bottom line: I am devoted to Science and Math, and to popularizing it to people
considered to be at the bottom, as well as professional Mathematicians
and scxientists, so many of whom outrank me in knowledge and standing.
You are one of the heroes who uses Fiction to promote Science, as did
Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein, and as Sir Arthur C. Clarke still
does.

Thank you for your kindness and consideration.

Prof. Jonathan Vos Post

==============

Saturday, June 02, 2007
Honorary Doctorate for Robert J. Sawyer
http://sfwriter.com/2007/06/honorary-doctorate-for-robert-j-sawyer.html

On Saturday, June 2, 2007, Robert J. Sawyer received an honorary
doctorate (Doctor of Letters, honoris causa) from Laurentian
University, in Sudbury, Ontario; Sawyer also gave the convocation
address to graduating arts students that day. The doctorate was given
in recognition of Sawyer's international success as a science-fiction
writer.

Laurentian, a bilingual English-and-French institution, is the leading
university in northern Ontario. During the same series of
convocations, other honorary doctorates were awarded, including to
civil-rights leader Minnijean Brown Trickey, one of the Little Rock
Nine. Laurentian bestowed its first honorary doctorate of letters in
1970, to Canadian literary legend Farley Mowat.

Sawyer's Hugo Award-winning novel Hominids and its sequels Humans and
Hybrids are set largely in the Sudbury area, including at the Sudbury
Neutrino Observatory and at Laurentian University itself (which is
known worldwide for Michael Persinger's research there using
transcranial magnetic stimulation inducing religious experiences,
research that figures prominently in Hybrids).

Sawyer was nominated for the doctorate by Michael Emond, a tenured
professor in Laurentian's Psychology Department. Said Emond when
making the nomination: "I could think of no better candidate that
exemplifies the reasons why I am proud to be Canadian."

Receiving the honorary doctorate was the final stop on Sawyer's
six-week book tour promoting the release of his seventeenth novel,
Rollback (Tor, April 2007).

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