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Welcome to Mark Perakh's web site

It is with great sorrow that Talk Reason announces the death of TR co-founder and major contributor Mark Perakh on May 7, 2013, following a brief illness. He was 88 years old.

Mark Perakh was a professor emeritus of mathematics and statistical mechanics at California State University in Fullerton, CA. Perakh taught physics and wrote some 300 scientific papers. His work in physics focused on superconductivity and his book on thin films was translated into eight languages. He also wrote and published the novel Man in a Wire Cage.

Perakh's fame particularly comes from writing about science and religion on Talk Reason (a website he helped found) and from his regular contributions to the blog The Panda's Thumb. He also wrote a book critical of pseudo-science, Unintelligent Design.

His death is a great loss to the scientific blogging community.

This page is a gate to several sections of Mark Perakh's web site.

1. Faith vs Science

This section comprises three parts. The first part includes articles discussing the relation  between science and the religious faith from a general viewpoint. The articles in the second part contain a critical discussion of the modern revival of creationism under the label of the "Intelligent Design theory." The third part contains  papers critically reviewing a number of written by both Jews and Christians with the aim of proving that the biblical story is fully compatible with scientific data.

(Please see the announcement in this section about Mark Perakh's book titled Unintelligent Design available from Amazon.com and other book-selling outlets).

2. Texts. This section deals with certain properties of meaningful texts vs randomized conglomerates of letters, in various languages.  The effect of the so called Letter Serial Correlation, discovered and studied by the authors of the articles in this section, is described with illustrations from both biblical and non-biblical texts.  This section comprises several parts, of which the first one requires for its full understanding a certain background in mathematical statistics (whereas those interested in the subject but lacking such a background still can get some idea as to the method used, by omitting mathematical derivations).  Other parts could be understood also by people having no knowledge of mathematical statistics.

3. Short stories by Mark Perakh (in Russian) - this file can be read only if a cyrillic font has been installed.

4. Short stories by Mark Perakh (in English).

5. Laughing under the covers. This section contains about 600 Russian oral jokes, translated into English, supplied with commentaries and an introduction, and categorized in accordance with topics which range from political jokes which in the times of the communist regime would earn the narrator some ten years in Siberian prison camps, to jokes with sexual connotations, etc.

6. Poems by Mark Perakh in Russian

7. Mark Perakh's personal information cd-rom.gif (2994 bytes)

This section contains Mark Perakh's curriculum vitae as a professor of physics, as well as some materials related to his avocational activities etc.

Comments: marperakATcox.net (help fighting spam - replace AT with @)