The entry is quite recent. I didn’t notice it until yesterday but, judging by the article’s history, it went live on January 1, 2026. It contains some information I wasn’t aware of, which is not at all surprising. The two most interesting pieces of information are that she began her career at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. and that she had had an affair with David Bohm, the physicist. I knew about her extensive correspondence with Bohm I suspected that there had been an affair – judging from a remark she’d made, though I forget just where – but I didn’t actually know that.
What’s important is simply that she’s finally in Wikipedia. She wasn’t when I first mentioned her at New Savanna back in June 3, 2020. I’ve known about her work since 1978, when she made a comment on Haugeland’s article about cognitivism. Her 1975 article on Fourier logic became central to the article David Hays and I published about the brain, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence, which is cited in the Wikipedia entry. In that article she considers two different kinds of computational regime, which she refers to as Fourier or holographic, and sequential. That distinction is fundamentally the same as the symbolic vs. neural distinction in current AI discourse.
That article is important because, and here I’m quoting from a remark Claude made in a recent discussion I had with it:
She doesn't take one computational system as object. She takes the relationship between two incommensurable computational regimes as object, and proves something about what the structure of reality requires of that relationship. She steps outside both regimes simultaneously and asks: given the kinds of objects that exist in the world, what must any adequate cognitive system contain? The answer — both regimes, necessarily, not contingently — is a proof about the space of possible cognitive architectures rather than a result within any particular architecture.
And that is why I’ve been mentioning her work whenever I have a chance. Until her work has been taken into account, the current debate is poorly formulated and incomplete, to put it charitably. A less charitable formulation would be that the debate isn’t intellectually serious. It’s mostly about intellectual ideology and commercially-oriented hype.
I take the fact that Yevick now has a Wikipedia entry as a sign that her work of 40 years ago may eventually recognized and extended.
