Dr. Barry Fagin

http://www.faginfamily.net/barry

 

Dr 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 and Senior Associate Dean of the Faculty*.

 

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, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and an Adjunct Scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.   His current research involves improving internet security through the development of software with mathematically provable security properties.

 

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.  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 is a member of Who's Who in America, and is a 2009 recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Award from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.  In 2012, he was named the Colorado Professor of the Year by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education in Washington DC.

 

Dr Fagin served as Senior Associate Dean of the Faculty from 2020-2022, writing reports for Congress and helping to draft USAFA's new tenure policy.  He was recently nominated to become the first Milanovich Professor of Computer Science, and is expected to officially accept the chair by the summer of 2023.

 

In his copious spare time, Dr. Fagin is an avid runner, mountain climber, snowboarder and jazz keyboardist.  Excerpts from concert performances are available on his youtube channel.  Best of all, he is the father of Max and Erica Fagin.

 

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.