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Biography Florentin Smarandache
Born on December 10, 1954, in Balcesti (district of Vâlcea), Romania, wrote in three languages: Romanian, French, and English.
Poet, playwright, novelist, writer of prose, tales for children, translator from many languages, experimental painter, philosopher, physicist, mathematician.
American citizen.
He graduated from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Craiova in 1979, got a Ph. D. in Mathematics from the State University of Kishinev in 1997, and continued postdoctoral studies at various American Universities after emigration.
In U.S. he worked as a software engineer for Honeywell (1990-1995), adjunct professor for Pima Community College (1995-1997), and since 1997 Assistent Professor at the University of New Mexico, Gallup Campus, where in 2003 he was promoted to Associate Professor of Mathematics.
During the Romanian communist era he got in conflict with authorities. In 1986 he did the hunger strike for being refused to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians at the University of Berkeley, then published a letter in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society for the freedom of circulating of scientists, and became a dissident. As a consequence, he remained unemployed for almost two years, living from private tutoring done to students. The Swedish Royal Academy Foreign Secretary Olof G. Tandberg contacted him by telephone from Bucharest.
Not being allowed to publish, he tried to get his manuscripts out of the country through
the French School of Bucharest and tourists, but for many of them he lost track.
Escaped from Romania in September 1988 and waited almost two years in the political refugee camps of Turkey, where he did unskilled works in construction in order to survive: scavenger, house painter, whetstoner. Here he kept in touch with the French Cultural Institutes that facilitated him the access to books and rencontres with personalities.
He left behind his peasant parents (although the only child of them), pregnant wife (he saw his second born son Silviu two years and half when the family reunited to America), a seven year old son Mihai.
Before leaving the country he buried some of his manuscripts in a metal box in his parents vineyard, near a peach tree, that he retrieved four years later, after the 1989 Revolution, when he returned for the first time to his native country. Other manuscripts, that he tried to mail to a translator in France, were confiscated by the secret police and never returned.
In March 1990 he emigrated to the United States.
Only during year 2000 he published 20 books, an international record!
He wrote thousands of pages of diary about his life in the Romanian dictatorship (unpublished), as a cooperative teacher in Morocco ("Professor in Africa", 1999), in the Turkish refugee camp ("Escaped... / Diary From the Refugee Camp", Vol. I, II, 1994, 1998), and in the American exile - diary which is still going on.
But he's internationally known as the literary school leader for the "paradoxism" movement which has many advocates in the world, that he set up in 1980, based on an excessive use of antitheses, antinomies, contradictions, paradoxes in creation paradoxes - both at the small level and the entire level of the work - making an interesting connection between mathematics, philosophy, and literature[http://www.geocities.com/charlestle/paradoxism.html].
He introduced the 'paradoxist distich', 'tautologic distich', and 'dualistic distich', inspired from the mathematical logic [ http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/a/lit.htm ].
Literary experiments he realized in his dramas: Country of the Animals, where there is no dialogue!, and An Upside-Down World, where the scenes are permuted to give birth to one billion of billions of distinct dramas!
[ http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/a/theatre.htm ].
He stated:
"Paradoxism started as an anti-totalitarian protest against a closed society, where the whole culture was manipulated by a small group. Only their ideas and publications counted. We couldn't publish almost anything.
Then, I said: Let's do literature... without doing literature! Let's write... without actually writing anything. How? Simply: literature-object! 'The flight of a bird', for example, represents a "natural poem", that is not necessary to write down, being more palpable and perceptible in any language that some signs laid on the paper, which, in fact, represent an "artificial poem": deformed, resulted from a translation by the observant of the observed, and by translation one falsifies.
(…)Therefore, a mute protest we did!
Later, I based it on contradictions. Why? Because we lived in that society a double life: an official one - propagated by the political system, and another one real. In mass-media it was promulgated that 'our life is wonderful', but in reality 'our life was miserable'. The paradox flourishing! And then we took the creation in derision, in inverse sense, in a syncretic way. Thus the paradoxism was born. The folk jokes, at great fashion in Ceausescu's 'Epoch', as an intellectual breathing, were superb springs.
The "No" and "Anti" from my paradoxist manifestos had a creative character, not at all nihilistic." Paradoxism, following the line of dadaism, lettrism, absurd theatre, is a kind of up-side down writings!
He did many poetical experiments within his avant-garde and published paradoxist manifestos: "Le Sens du Non-Sens" (1983), "Anti-chambres/Antipoésies/Bizarreries" (1984, 1989), "NonPoems" (1990), changing the French and respectively English linguistics clichés. While "Paradoxist Distichs" (1998) introduces new species of poetry with fixed form.
Eventually he edited the "Second International Anthology on Paradoxism" (2000) with texts from 100 writers from around the world in many languages.
"MetaHistory" (1993) is a theatrical trilogy against the totalitarism again, with dramas that experiment towards a total theatre: "Formation of the New Man", "An Upside - Down World", "The Country of the Animals". The last drama, that pioneers no dialogue on the stage, was awarded at the International Theatrical Festival of Casablanca (1995).
"Trickster's Famous Deeds" (1994, auto-translated into English 2000), theatrical trilogy for children, mixes the Romanian folk tradition with modern and SF situations.
His first novel is called "NonNovel" (1993) and satirizes the dictatorship in a gloomy way, by various styles and artifice within one same style.
"Faulty Writings" (1997) is a collection of short stories and prose within paradoxism, bringing hybrid elements from rebus and science into literature.
His experimental albums "Outer-Art" (Vol. I, 2000 & Vol. II: The Worst Possible Art in the World!, 2003) comprises over-paintings, non-paintings, anti-drawings, super-photos, foreseen with a manifesto: "Ultra-Modernism?" and "Anti-manifesto"
[ http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/a/outer-art.htm ].
Art was for Dr. Smarandache a hobby. He did:
- graphic arts for his published volumes of verse: "Anti-chambres/ Anti-poesies/ Bizarreries" (mechanical drawings), "NonPoems" (paradoxist drawings), "Dark Snow" & "Circles of light" (covers);
- paradoxist collages for the "Anthology of the Paradoxist Literary Movement", by J. -M. Levenard, I. Rotaru, A. Skemer;
- covers and illustrations of books, published by "Dorul" Publ. Hse., Aalborg, Denmark;
- illustrations in the journal: "Dorul" (Aalborg, Denmark).
Many of his art works are held in "The Florentin Smarandache Papers" Special Collections at the Arizona State University, Tempe, and Texas State University, Austin (USA), also in the National Archives of Valcea and Romanian Literary Museum (Romania), and in the Musee de Bergerac (France).
Nine books were published that analyze his literary creation, among them: "Paradoxism's Aesthetics" by Titu Popescu (1995), and "Paradoxism and Postmodernism" by Ion Soare (2000).
In 1999 he was proposed for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Free literary books can be downloaded from the site: http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/eBooksLiterature.htm
In mathematics there are several entries named Smarandache Functions, Sequences, Constants, and Paradoxes in international journals and encyclopedias. He generalized the fuzzy, intuitive, paraconsistent, multi-valent, dialetheist logics to the 'neutrosophic logic' (also called "Smarandache Logic" in the Denis Howe's Dictionary of Computing, England) and, similarly, he generalized the fuzzy set to the 'neutrosophic set' (and its derivatives: 'paraconsistent set', 'intuitionistic set', 'dialethist set', 'paradoxist set', 'tautological set').
Also, he proposed an extension of the classical probability and the imprecise probability to the 'neutrosophic probability', that he defined as a tridimensional vector whose components are real subsets of the non-standard interval ]-0, 1+[.
He's organizing the 'First International Conference on Neutrosophics' at the University of New Mexico, 1-3 December 2001 [http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/FirstNeutConf.htm].
He published over 80 scientific notes and articles.
Since 2002, together with Dr. Jean Dezert from Office National de Recherches Aeronautiques in Paris, worked in information fusion and generalized the Dempster-Shafer Theory to a new theory of plausible and paradoxist fusion (Dezert-Smarandache Theory): http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/DSmT.htm.
In physics he proposed the hypothesis that 'there is no speed barrier in universe' and even more: that the 'speed may be infinite' (called Smarandache Hypothesis in some Physics Dictionaries), and quantum paradoxes [ http://www.geocities.com/m_l_perez/QuantumPhysics.html ].
In philosophy he introduced the 'neutrosophy', as a generalization of Hegel's dialectic, which is the basement of his researches in mathematics and economics, such as 'neutrosophic logic', 'neutrosophic set', 'neutrosophic probability', 'neutrosophic statistics'.
Other contributions he had in psychology [ http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/psychology.htm ],
and in sociology [ http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/sociology.htm ].
Very prolific, he is the author, co-author, and editor of 62 books, and contributed to over 100 literary and 50 scientific journals from around the world.
Over 20 books have been dedicated to his scientific activity:
1) An Introduction to the Smarandache Function, by Charles Ashbacher, Vail, 1995, 60 p.
2) The Most Paradoxist Mathematician of the World, by Charles T. Le, Los Angeles, 1995, 54 p.
3) Collection of Problems on Smarandache Notions, by Charles Ashbacher, Vail, 1996, 73 p.
4) Comments and Topics on Smarandache Notions and Problems, by Kenichiro Kashihara, Vail, 1996, 46 p.
5) The Smarandache Function, by C. Dumitrescu și V. Seleacu, Vail, 1996, 134 p.
6) Surfing on the Ocean of Numbers / a Few Smarandache Notions and Similar Topics, by Henry Ibstedt, Vail, 1997, 75 p.
7) Proceedings of the First International Conference on Smarandache Type Notions in Number Theory, editors C. Dumitrescu and V. Seleacu, Lupton, 1997, 208 p.
8) Computer Analysis of Number Sequences, by Henry Ibstedt, Lupton, 1998, 87 p.
9) Pluckings from the Tree of Smarandache Sequences and Functions, by Charles Ashbacher, Lupton, 1999, 87.
10) On Some of the Smarandache's Problems, by Krassimir Atanassov, Lupton, 1999, 88 p.
11) A Set of New Smarandache Functions, Sequences and Conjectures in Number Theory, by Felice Russo, Lupton, 2000, 114 p.
12-21) Smarandache Algebraic Structures (Vol. I: Groupoids; Vol. II: Semigroups; Vol. III: Semirings, Semifields, and Semivector Spaces; Vol. IV: Loops; Vol. V: Rings; Vol. VI: Near-rings; Vol. VII: Non-associative Rings; Vol. VIII: Bialgebraic Structures; Vol. IX: Fuzzy Algebra; Vol. X: Linear Algebra), book series by W. B. Vasantha Kandasamy, 2002-2003.
The books can be downloaded for free from:
http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/eBooks-otherformats.htm.
International Conferences:
First International Conference on Smarandache Type Notions in Number Theory,
August 21-24, 1997, organized by Dr. C. Dumitrescu & Dr. V. Seleacu, University of Craiova, Romania.
International Conference on Smarandache Geometries, May 3-5 2003, organized by Dr. M. Khoshnevisan, Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus, Queensland, Australia.
International Conference on Smarandache Algebraic Structures, December 17-19, 2004, organized by W. B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Indian Institute of Technology, IIT Madras, Chennai - 600 036 Tamil Nadu, India.
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Recommended Reading
: (long poem)