The Neukom Institute at Dartmouth presents the Spring 2015 Donoho Colloquium with Steven Levy, editor in chief of Backchannel, the new hub for tech writing on Medium.   He is the former senior staff writer for Wired, the former chief technology correspondent for Newsweek and the author of seven books. The Washington Post describes him as “American’s premier technology journalist . . . a Silicon Valley insider who writes for the rest of us on the outside.”

His talk , "Hackers and Geniuses," reveals that the great progress in the computer revolution has been from hackers--not the malfeasants that the term often connotes, but creative, driven, often idealistic people who have used the vast opportunities of a digital platform to build products and systems that have changed our lives.  The computer's properties have also been a training ground for a few of those rare people who qualify as geniuses.  In my interactions with those amazing people--Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Stephen Wolfram and others--I've been driven to ponder how and why such geniuses thrive in the digital age.   

Reception to follow.