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Eli Harari, the CEO of SanDisk was recently profiled by Electronic Business. Harari, who received his Ph.D. from Princeton’s joint program in materials science and mechanical and aerospace engineering, is a pioneer in non-volatile semiconductor information storage.

Barrie Royce, who supervised Harari’s doctoral work, told Electronic Business that he remembered thinking that the electrical charges that built up in the MOS insulators Harari was studying as a graduate student were a nuisance. But, said Royce, “Eli had the vision and intuition that this could really be quite a useful thing if he could use the phenomenon as an information-storage system.”

In the profile Harari reflects on what he has learned about leadership in the world of business, “including the importance of having a tightly focused strategic plan, having a cohesive board of directors and hiring the right people.” Read the profile here.

Harari, who holds more than 100 patents, was most recently issued a patent Dec. 26 for re-programmable non-volatile memory cards.

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Robert F. Service, writing in the Dec. 22 issue of Science explores the role that nanotechnology will play in the future of disk-drive technology. In the piece, he cites the nanoimprint technology developed by Stephen Chou at Princeton as being promising in the never-ending quest to increase disk drives’ capacity while shrinking their size. Chou invented a technique for using e-beam lithography to create master stamps with tiny features that are imprinted into a malleable plastic.

Princeton Engineering just acquired a new e-beam writer, which will be used by Chou and his graduate students and many others at Princeton Engineering. Helena Gleskova, director of micro-nanfabrication, oversees the e-beam writer.

You can read the entire Science piece here.

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Ed Felten, professor of computer science at Princeton and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, has been named to the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the legendary advocacy organization dedicated to preserving civil liberties in the digital age.

Felten also is quoted in the current issue of SC Magazine on Sony BMG’s recent $4.25 million settlement over controversial software that the company installed on its music CDs. Felten and graduate student Alex Halderman played a crucial role in bringing the software flaws to public attention.

Read more at ars technica and SC Magazine.

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For the December 29 issue of Nature, computer scientist Bernard Chazelle has penned a News & Views piece on a tantalizing idea known as the PCP theorem, which proposes that any mathematical proof can be immediately verified through randomization.

“To appreciate fully the significance of PCP,” writes Chazelle in his characteristically spirited style, “imagine you wake up one morning with your head full of a complete proof of the Riemann hypothesis. (This is arguably the greatest open problem in mathematics, and is a deep statement about the distribution of the prime numbers, the atoms of arithmetic.)” …

At last year’s annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Chazelle predicted that we will see an Einstein of algorithms in the near future. Ever since his AAAS talk, Chazelle’s ideas have been ricocheting through the cybersphere, mentioned most recently in HPC Wire.

In his reportedly very amusing AAAS talk, as well as in a piece he wrote for Math Horizons, Chazelle expressed bemusement over the recent precipitous decline in undergraduates majoring in computer science. Apparently, the decline has swiftly reversed itself. Computer science chair Larry Peterson reports that CS enrollment, at least at Princeton, is up by more than 20 percent.

You can find Chazelle’s original algorithm essay here. Or, if you are fluent in Greek, you might want to read this recent profile of him in Greece’s version of Time magazine.

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