Yale Stewart Landsberg
Yale Stewart Landsberg | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 10, 1944 New York, New York, United States |
| Died | April 28, 2022 (aged 77) Palmyra, Virginia, United States |
| Residence | Charlottesville, VA, United States |
| Alma mater | M.S. in Operations Research |
| Known for | models of cognition, Free Masonry |
Yale Stewart Landsberg (May 10, 1944 – April 28, 2022) was an American operations researcher and independent thinker who spent much of his life developing informal models of cognition and reasoning. He is best known for the dialogue book Quaestiones Neutrosophicae, which he co-authored with the mathematician Florentin Smarandache.
Biography
Landsberg was born on May 10, 1944, in New York, New York. He earned a Master of Science degree in Operations Research and worked early in his career directly for Gene Amdahl, the computer architect who served as chief architect of the IBM System/360 mainframe. By his own account, he spent roughly four decades thinking about mathematics, science, and logic in what he described as a deliberately non-academic way, working over many years on a personal project concerned with how ideas are sought, found, and retained.
In his later years he lived in the Charlottesville area of Virginia. He died on April 28, 2022, in Palmyra, Virginia, at the age of 77.
Work
Landsberg's principal published work is Quaestiones Neutrosophicae (Educational Publisher, Columbus, Ohio, 2015; ISBN 978-1-59973-341-8), co-authored with Florentin Smarandache, the founder of neutrosophy. The book collects a series of email conversations the two held during early 2015 in which Landsberg posed questions about neutrosophy, Smarandache geometry, and neutrosophic logic and related them to his own ideas. Neutrosophy is a branch of philosophy that studies the origin and nature of neutralities, treating every idea together with its opposite and the spectrum of neutral states in between.
In these dialogues Landsberg framed change as a process in which anything can have both "a degree of going away" from a state and "a level of coming towards" it, together with a degree of undecidedness—a formulation he connected to neutrosophic logic. He also described a long-running personal framework built around the metaphors of a "Seeker," a "Finder," and a "Keeper" as a way of modeling cognition and inquiry, which he sought to combine with Smarandache's ideas.