The boards of the Histechnica Association and of the KIVI Department of the History of Engineering are pleased to invite you to attend a lecture to be delivered by Prof Dr H.J. Sips entitled:

THE GREAT ACCELERATION

Date: Saturday 17 December 2022, starting at 11.00 am

Location: Science Centre, Bouwcampus 26, entrance 'B', Van der Burghweg 2, 2628 CS Delft

Entrance 'B' of the Science Centre

Programme

10.30:00: Walk-in with coffee and tea

11:00: Welcome and introduction

11.05:00: Lecture by Prof Henk Sips

11:50 a.m.: Break

12:15: Continuation of lecture and concluding discussion

12:45: End of the meeting.

Please register to attend this lecture:

  • KIVI members should register via the KIVI website
  • Members of Histechnica should register through the secretary hotzeboonstra@gmail.com
  • Interested parties who are not members can also register through the above channels. There will then be a charge of €5.00.

The lecture will be broadcast live; below is the link (also available for later viewing):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mUg071FxNc

Summary of the lecture

Exponential growth is difficult for humans to grasp, as the recent Covid epidemic showed. Usually, such growth is short-lived due to all sorts of material constraints.

Yet such growth has been going on for about 120 years in information technology. This is usually identified by the development of chip technology, but this alone would have been far from sufficient. The lecture will outline the historical development of methods and techniques from various disciplines that have enabled this growth from the late 19th century to the present; mathematics, physics, mechanics, materials science, electrical engineering and software engineering. It goes on to discuss the factors already limiting this growth today and how solutions have been found to them.

At the end of the lecture, the question remains: will this continue? Where are the future growth limitations and can new techniques such as quantum computing, for example, offer a solution?

Information about the speaker

Henk Sips (1950) was professor of computer science at TU Delft from 1996 to 2016, specialising in parallel and distributed systems. Before that, he was a part-time professor at Tilburg University (1984-1994) and the University of Amsterdam (1094-1996). He studied electrical engineering at TU Delft and received his PhD from the same university.

In research, he has been active in the areas of parallel computing architectures, parallel programming languages, mobile computing and distributed systems.

He has also been administratively active, locally as chairman of the department of software technology at TU Delft's Faculty of EWI, but also nationally as a board member of the NWO's Area Board of Science and co-founder of the national research school ASCI.

He is (co)author of 200 scientific publications and supervisor of more than 50 PhD students.

Henk Sips chairman of Histechnica.

Upcoming activities at Science Center Delft:

  • Saturday 28 January 2023 at 11:00 lecture by Prof J.W. van Till: "Historical penetrations of General Purpose Technologies"
  • Saturday 25 February 2023 at 11:00 a.m. lecture by Mr J.P. Sigmond: "Paul van Vlissingen & son, 19th-century entrepreneurs in steam"
  • Saturday 25 March 2023 at 11:00 a.m. lecture by Dr C.J. van Dullemen: "The life and works of Prof Richard Schoemaker"

On the occasion of KIVI's 175th anniversary, the History of Engineering Department has published a book highlighting the three founders of KIVI in the times in which they lived. The book will be available free of charge during the lecture for members of Histechnica and for members of the KIVI Department of History of Technology.

Documents