Dr. Barry Fagin graduated magna cum laude from Brown University in 1982, and received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1987. He is currently Professor of Computer Science at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs*.
Dr. Fagin has maintained a lifelong interest in connecting the world of ideas to the world of politics. He is the founder of Families Against Internet Censorship, a successful plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that secured First Amendment protections for the internet. He is a frequent commentator on talk radio, and has been quoted in The New York Times, the Village Voice, and Salon. Dr. Fagin is currently a featured columnist in The Colorado Springs Gazette.
In addition to numerous columns for the popular media, Dr. Fagin is the author of over thirty scholarly papers covering areas of computer science and public policy. He is the co-inventor of the Crandall-Fagin multiplication algorithm, used to discover the world's largest prime numbers. He is also a former Information Director for the Association of Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computers and Society, and an Adjunct Scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Fagin is also a committed scientist and critical thinker, serving in that capacity as the resident skeptic for the KKTV series "Unexplained Colorado". He is a contributing writer for the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, and a member of the Rocky Mountain Skeptics, Sigma Xi, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a National Civil Liberties Award recipient, a Senior Fellow in Technology Policy at the Independence Institute in Golden, CO, and lay Torah reader at Temple Shalom in Colorado Springs, where he lives with his wife and two children. A Fulbright Scholar and a fluent Russian speaker, he has translated pages for the Web site of St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater and Kirov Ballet. Dr. Fagin was recently elected to Who's Who in America.
In his spare time, Dr. Fagin is the keyboardist for "Geeks Bearing Riffs", a local jazz band drawn from the Colorado Springs science and engineering community.
*DISCLAIMER: For all media appearances, Dr. Fagin's views are his own. His appearances are always as a private citizen, and he does not speak for the Air Force Academy in any way.
