Dr. Barry Fagin

Barry Fagin PhotoDr. Fagin graduated magna cum laude from Brown University in 1982, and received the PhD 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 of Reno v. ACLU et. al. He has appeared on Montel Williams, Good Morning America, NBC Nightly News, MS/NBC and the Colorado PBS show “Independent Thinking”. His columns have appeared in national papers, including the Christian Science Monitor and Newsday, as well as every major newspaper in his home state of Colorado, where he has testified before the General Assembly. 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 ACM/SIGCAS, and an Adjunct Scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.

Dr. Fagin is a committed scientist and critical thinker. He is a contributing writer for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a member of the Rocky Mountain Skeptics, Sigma Xi, the MAA and AAAS. He is a National Civil Liberties Award recipient, a Senior Fellow at the Independence Institute, and lay Torah reader at Temple Shalom in Colorado Springs, where he lives. Dr. Fagin is also the proud recipient of the 2009 Thomas Jefferson Award for 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.

For additional information, including copies of Dr Fagin’s work, see http://www.faginfamily.net/barry.

*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 Academy in any way.