Sven Birkerts has been editor of AGNI Magazine since July 2002. He is the author of six books, including An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on 20th Century Literature, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994), and My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time (2002). He has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, Amherst, and Mt. Holyoke College. [ Source: Boston University ]

Selections from The Gutenberg Elegies are available On-line.

Brockman's The Third Culture (1995) "consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are". Brockman's The Next Fifty Years (2002) gathers essays from 25 leading scientists that "explore not only the practical possibilities of the near future but also the social and political ramifications of the developments of the strange new world to come". Check out the web site for Edge (source for above).

Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, is Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford University. His books about evolution and science include The Selfish Gene (1976), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River Out of Eden (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), and most recently, Unweaving the Rainbow. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and also of the Royal Society of Literature.
[Source: The World of Richard Dawkins

Samuel Florman is well known as the author of books celebrating the engineering profession, and as an articulate voice for the working engineer. Florman is author of The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (1976), The Civilized Engineer (1987), and The Introspective Engineer (1996). He writes on engineering, its role in society, and the need for creative technological solutions to twenty-first-century problems. A civil engineer, Florman is a member of the National Academy of Engineers and is chairman of Kreisler Borg Florman Construction Company, New York. [Sources: Interview, NSPE (2004) Action Needed from Engineers in Difficult Times ]

Martin Gardner is perhaps best known for his Mathematical Games column that ran for 30 years in Scientific American. He more or less singlehandedly sustained and nurtured interest in recreational mathematics for a large part of the 20th century. Gardner's books include the essay collection The Night is Large (1995), the wonderful Annotated Alice (1979), and numerous book promoting science and debunking psuedo-science. [ Source: Wikipedia: Martin Gardner ]

Gould was the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Geology at Harvard University and curator for invertibrate paleontology in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He was perhaps the most influential and widely read writer of popular science of his generation. Gould became widely known through his monthly science essays in Natural History magazine, and the ten collections of these essays from Ever Since Darwin (1977) through I Have Landed (2002). Gould was an emphatic advocate of evolution and wrote prolifically on the subject. He was also an enthusiastic baseball fan and made frequent references to the sport (and a very wide range of other topics). [ Source: Wikipedia ].

Douglas Hofstadter is best known for Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, which won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. He is a College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science, Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology at Indiana University at Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition. He succeeded Martin Gardner and his "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American magazine in 1985 with a column entitled "Metamagical Themas" (an anagram of "Mathematical Games"). [Sources: Wikipedia, Hofstadter Home Page ]

Alan Lightman is a novelist, essayist, physicist, and educator. Currently, he is Adjunct Professor of Humanities at MIT. His books include the essay collections Time Travel and Papa Joe's Pipe (1984), A Modern Day Yankee in a Connecticut Court (1986), and Dance for Two (1996). Fiction work includes the acclaimed Einstein's Dreams (1993) and Good Benito (1995). He has also published several books on science. [ Source: Lightman's Home Page ]

Alex Lightman is cofounder and CEO of Charmed Technology, the author of Brave New Unwired World, and an innovator in wearable computers. Lightman is associated with UC's California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). [Source: Charmed Technology]

French courtier and author of Essais (1572-80, 1588), which established a new literary form. Montaigne has remained the greatest exponent of the essay, a short piece that discusses the author's personal thoughts about a particular subject. His successors have followed him in the use of the self as subject, the replacement of logical thought by free association, and the use of essay as "a literary device for saying almost everything about anything" (Aldous Huxley). [Source]

Henry Petroski is Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and Professor of History at Duke University. Professor Petroski's current research activity focuses on the areas of failure analysis and design theory. Ongoing projects include the use of case histories to understand the role of human error and failure in engineering design as well as the development of models for invention and evolution in the engineering design process. He has published over seventy refereed journal articles.

Professor Petroski is author of the book, To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1985), and is the writer and presenter of the 1987 BBC-television documentary, To Engineer Is Human, which has been broadcast on PBS. He is also the author of The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (1990), The Evolution of Useful Things (1992), Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering (1994), Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing (1996), and Re-making the World: Adventures in Engineering (1997), and he writes the engineering column for American Scientist. Professor Petroski is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Neil Postman was the Paulette Goddard Chair of Media Ecology at New York University and chair of the Department of Culture and Communication. He wrote on education (Teaching as a Conserving Activity and The Disappearance of Childhood), on the effect of media (Amusing Ourselves to Death), and on the overall effects of technology (Technopoly).

David Quammen is best known as a natural history essayist. From 1981 to 1996, his column Natural Acts appeared in Outside magazine. His perspective is "a quirky, iconoclastic take on our views about and interactions with nature, from the contradictions of the wilderness experience to the role of earthworms in ecological stability". His best essays are gathered into the collections, Natural Acts (1985), The Flight of the Iguana (1988), Wild Thoughts from Wild Places (1998), and The Boilerplate Rhino (2000). The critically acclaimed The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, was published in 1996. His follow-up, Monsters of God, was published in 2003.

"Should Quammen's short pieces be called 'essays' or 'articles'? The former term implies a literate informality, the latter an emphasis on fact over opinion. But that's a characteristic of Quammen's hybrid style. It's fact-filled, informative, enlightening, but always in his own voice. His personality and point of view shape the presentation and make it deeper than any dry recitation of facts". [ Source: Michael Sims in Bookpage.com ]

Roy Rivenburg, an award-winning feature writer for the Los Angeles Times, might be best described as a free-lance writer looking at current issues with a typically humorous slant. You can find out more about him at his Off Kilter web site.

Despite Sagan's fame as popular writer and TV personality, his main career was in academia as the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Science at Cornell University from 1968 until his death. He also worked for NASA and was responsible for NASA Space Probes Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager I and II interstellar messages, and worked with the Mariner, Voyager and Viking planetary exploration craft. "Sagan will be remembered as a giant in astronomy for his long record of professional accomplishments, his superb writing, and his outstanding ability to communicate complex ideas in simple ways" (Source: Dave Eicher, ASTRONOMY). His best known work remains the 13-part television series Cosmos (1980). His books include: The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective, 1973; the Pulitzer-prize winning The Dragons of Eden: Speculations of the Origin of Human Intelligence, 1977; Broca's Brain: Reflections of the Romance of Science, 1980; Cosmos, 1980; Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1994; Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark, 1995; Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium, 1997 [Sources: Carl Sagan; Carl Sagan tribute ]

Lewis Thomas had an illustrious medical career as a researcher and administrator. In later life, he began writing short essays "for fun", many published in The New England Journal of Medicine. These short pieces established him as a serious essayist who combined a deep knowledge of science and medicine with reflections on nature and being human, perhaps initiating the style that Weissmann, Gould, and others continued. His essays are collected in several volumes including: The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (Viking Press, 1974), The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (Viking Press, 1979), The Youngest Science: Notes of a Medicine-Watcher (Viking Press, 1983), Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony (Viking Press, 1983), and The Fragile Species (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992). An interesting biography and review of his essays is available on the web.

Weissmann is a professor of medicine and director of the Biotechnology Study Center at New York University School of Medicine. Selected essays have been collected in six books including: The Woods Hole Cantata (1985), They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus (1987), Democracy and DNA (1995), and Darwin's Audubon (1998).

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