Nyquist’s frequency

It drives me crazy when people refer to the ‘arts’ as being creative. Is the implication that science and technology is a desert of enforced intellectual servitude? Someone who lived in a hive of technical creativity was Harry Nyquist, one of the founders of information theory, whose ideas underpin most of the tech we use today.

Nyquist was born in a small village in Sweden in 1889, one of seven siblings. Along with many other Scandinavians, his family emigrated to the fertile plains of the middle west of the United States, a cultural milieu made famous by Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days and the Cohen brothers’ film Fargo: stoic communities of farmers who sought comfort through hard work and quiet religious observance.