On September 29, 2015, the doyen of the Editorial board of Serdica Journal
of Computing, Prof. Edward Friedman, celebrated his 80 th anniversary.

This special issue is dedicated to the birthday boy in recognition of his numerous
contributions: to science, to promoting effective strategies in integrating digital
technologies with mathematics and science education, to adapting a software sys
tem for the health treatment of rural patients in India and Sub-Saharan Africa,
and most recently—to the development of new university courses on raising the
awareness of the threat of nuclear terrorism

Sendova, Evgenia

Bulgarian Digital Mathematics Library at IMI-BAS

CELEBRATING THE 80th ANNIVERSARYOF PROFESSOR EDWARD A. FRIEDMAN,SCIENTIST AND EDUCATOROn September 29, 2015, the doyen of the Editorial board of Serdica Jour-nal of Computing, Prof. Edward Friedman, celebrated his 80th anniversary. Thisspecial issue is dedicated to the birthday boy in recognition of his numerouscontributions: to science, to promoting effective strategies in integrating digitaltechnologies with mathematics and science education, to adapting a software sys-tem for the health treatment of rural patients in India and Sub-Saharan Africa,and most recently—to the development of new university courses on raising theawareness of the threat of nuclear terrorism.Bulgaria-related activitiesThe year was 1992. I learned from my colleagues Lubomir Davidov, IvanStanchev and Radoslav Yoshinov that Prof. Edward Friedman was coming to theInstitute of Mathematics and Informatics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences(IMI—BAS) as a Fulbright scholar. The previous year he had been an invitedspeaker at an international conference held in the Black Sea resort Albena byIMI—BAS. At that time he had also been invited by the American Embassy inSofia to speak at a forum on American culture—one of the first cultural eventsheld to mark the start of a new era in US–Bulgarian relations.What we knew about him at that time was that he was a graduate fromMIT, doctor in Physics from Columbia University, Dean of the College at StevensInstitute of Technology. We learned that his recognitions concerning educationincluded the Albert Einstein Medal for Educational Accomplishments from theGovernor of the State of New Jersey and an educational medal from the King ofAfghanistan for contributions to higher education in that country.xii Celebrating the 80th Anniversary of Professor Edward A. FriedmanSo, I was intrigued with his choice of a Fulbright hosting institution. Itturned out that Edward Friedman’s main interest was in studying the specificsof mathematics education in Bulgaria, in particular some good practices in theimplementation of the digital technologies in inquiry-based style. At that time, ateam mentored by Bozhidar Sendov comprising Ph.D. students from the Facultyof Mathematics and Informatics at Sofia University had been developing and im-plementing the Plane Geometry System (PGS)—a software product functioningas a mathematical laboratory and enabling pupils to construct and experimentwith Euclidean objects, to formulate and verify conjectures, i.e., to do (ratherthan to learn about) mathematics. From the very first days of his stay at IMI—BAS Prof. Friedman started playing with this system, studied the models ofvarious mechanical devices implemented in it as dynamic constructions by SvetlaBoytcheva, discussed the development of dynamic scenarios on geometric trans-formations with Lubomir Davidov, and soon suggested a better name for thesoftware—Geomland (the Land of Geometry). Two years later Prof. Friedmanwould write: While we are working hard in the U.S. to connect mathematicalproblem solving more to real work experience, Bozhidar Sendov and his teamshowed another possibility—making the objects of mathematics themselves moreconcrete and familiar. A combination of these approaches would perhaps be ideal.An additional topic of discussion with our Fulbright guest concerninga possible combination of the above approaches was a series of textbooks for8th–12th grade in mathematics and informatics launched in 1988 for the Bul-garian secondary school. The authors were researchers and educators in math-ematics and informatics (Blagovest Sendov, Todor Boyanov, Teodosi Vitanov,Darina Dicheva, Lubomir Davidov, Chavdar Lozanov, Roumen Nikolov, Evge-nia Sendova and Ivan Tonov) who endeavored to implement the positive expe-rience of the Research Group on Education (at the Bulgarian Academy of Sci-ences and the Ministry of Education) in integrating informatics with other schoolsubjects—mathematics, science and arts. These discussions showed some inter-esting differences between the goals of mathematics education in Bulgaria andUSA—applicability and pragmatism vs. beauty and life of the mind.My colleagues at the Institute remember dearly Ed’s friendliness andwarmth (he became Ed for all of us), his greeting us with Добър ден (Good dayin Bulgarian), his interest in Bulgarian history, culture and education, his buyingtickets for colleagues to fill a whole row of seats in the National opera house. Injust a couple of months spent in Bulgaria, when walking in the street, he would begreeted by more people than us, the colleagues who were accompanying him. . .Celebrating the 80th Anniversary of Professor Edward A. Friedman xiiiProf. Friedman (left) and Academician Ljubomir Iliev (right) found many commontopics of interest—from mathematics and informatics, to music and Saints Cyril andMethodius (the picture is from the IMI—BAS archive, taken in 1993)This Fulbright scholarship set the foundation of a fruitful collaborationbetween Bulgarian mathematics and informatics educators and the staff of theCenter for Improved Engineering and Science Education (CIESE) founded anddirected by Prof. Friedman at Stevens Institute of Technology.Through the years Ed Friedman had endeavored to foster exchanges andvisits promoting mutual understanding in the field of mathematics education.In 1993 he hosted Lubomir Davidov, then President of the Union of BulgarianMathematicians, as a Fulbright Scholar at Stevens Institute of Technology. ThereLubomir Davidov developed a set of educational modules on geometric transfor-mation by means of Geomland. Another visiting scholar at CIESE from Bulgariawas Pavel Boytchev who worked on the development of computer applications tobe used with real data in real time in the context of mathematics and scienceactivities. The applications relating to the use of vectors in teaching introductoryphysics turned out to be especially profitable.A very innovative Master of Science in Information Systems program waspromoted by Prof. Friedman and implemented with the efforts of Prof. RoumenNikolov (then Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics atSofia University) as a joint educational project between Stevens Institute of Tech-nology and Sofia University in 2005. The official agreement was signed in Sofiaon March 22nd, 2005. The signing event was attended by many representa-tives of the government authorities, the Bulgarian Investment Agency, leadingxiv Celebrating the 80th Anniversary of Professor Edward A. Friedmanbusiness organizations and IT companies, universities and local community. OnMay 22nd, 2006 USAID, which sponsored the first group of program participants,hosted an official event at the US Embassy in Sofia to celebrate the first year ofthe program in Bulgaria. Prof. Dr. Edward Friedman gave Stevens certificatesto student attendees of single MSIS courses. Present were Mr. Jeffrey Levine,Deputy Chief of the US Mission in Bulgaria, Mr. Michael Fritz, USAID MissionDirector for Bulgaria, Roumen Nikolov, directors of companies, representativesof state authorities, students and media.I personally had the privilege to be welcomed each year for more thana decade as a visitor, after completing my duties as a tutor at the ResearchScience Institute (RSI) international program organized jointly by the Center ofExcellence in Education, VA, and MIT. After the end of the respective issue of theRSI program, the research team of Prof. Friedman and I would exchange ideason various aspects of inquiry-based mathematics and science education (fromstructured to open inquiry level) and plan joint activities.Especially inspiring was a project launched in 1994 by the CIESE team,the goal being to implement Internet resources to reinforce the teaching of math-ematics and science in an international school setting. A global classroom anda new infrastructure for education were designed embracing scientists as well asteachers and students from more than 350 schools all over the world. As a co-ordinator of the Bulgarian participation in this project I would like to share myimpressions of the involvement of several schools (in Sofia, Plovdiv and Rousse).The students performed real-life experiments on various topics including acidrain and water quality, gathered data, analyzed trends and patterns on topics ofcurrent scientific interest and communicated their findings to the participatingscientists. Thus teachers and students were part of a genuine international re-search team. Even the parents got involved—there was a case in a Sofia schoolin which a student’s father brought a water sample from the Antarctic to becompared with the water they drank at school.Ed Friedman’s contributions to the promotion of good practices in math-ematics education between Bulgarians and Americans were significant also in thecontext of a series of workshops and seminars held in both the US and Bulgariaduring the years 1998 through 2006. The events held in Bulgaria were organizedjointly by the US organization Best Practices in Education and IMI—BAS.Prof. Friedman’s innovative ideas about the implementation of Internetresources to reinforce the teaching of mathematics and science have been greatlyappreciated and adopted by Bulgarian math educators and teachers in a schoolCelebrating the 80th Anniversary of Professor Edward A. Friedman xvsetting as well as in the context of higher education. His special role in the fieldof implementing ICT in education was deservedly recognized by the mathematicsand science community in Bulgaria—in the year 2000 he received a Sc.D. degreeHonoris Causa from Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, and in 2003 he be-came a Foreign Fellow of the Union of Bulgarian Mathematicians. The same yearhe was an invited speaker at the Mathematical Society of South Eastern Europe(MASSEE) conference held in the mountain resort Borovets and again at theMASSEE conference held in Cyprus in 2006. In 2008, he was a keynote speakerat the International Conference on Informatics that IMI—BAS co-sponsored inVarna.In 2009, a time difficult for the whole Bulgarian Academy of Sciences,Prof. Friedman expressed his support for IMI—BAS by an official letter to thelate Acad. Stefan Dodunekov (then Director of the Institute) as follows: TheIMI—BAS is an important source of scholarship and creativity, as well as a focalpoint for intellectual exchange with other countries. I can testify to the importantrole that it has played since 1991 in fostering mutual understanding with educatorsin the United States in the fields of mathematics and informatics.In our recent meetings I was impressed with Prof. Friedman’s variouscurrent involvements in an international setting—analyzing and promoting anoutstanding diagnostic expert system, which had been tested in India, for adap-tation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Currently, he is developing and delivering newuniversity courses dealing with preventing nuclear terrorism. On April 26, 2016,Prof. Friedman took part as a leading expert in a forum of the Federation ofAmerican Scientists to discuss the Chernobyl power plant explosion on the eveof its 30th anniversary, the lessons learned, and possible implications that thisfateful event has for the nuclear industry today.His family shares his international interests and greatly supports his ac-tivities. His spouse, Dr. Arline (AJ) Lederman, a retired fine-art professor, spon-sored jointly with him an album on Bulgarian ethnography. His older son, Timur,teaches computer science at the University of Paris, and the yonger, Kerim,teaches anthropology at Dong Hua University in Taiwan. An interesting detailof their connection to Bulgaria is that as children they were using the Cyrillicalphabet to code their messages to each other.Finally, I could not pass over the support Ed Friedman gave to the Bul-garian national team at its match vs. Mexico at the Round of 16, 1994 FIFAcup. Our poster with ХАЙДЕ НАШ’ТЕ! (Go Go Go in Bulgarian) attracteda significant group of people whose enthusiastic encouragement was decisive forxvi Celebrating the 80th Anniversary of Professor Edward A. Friedmanthe win with penalties (4:2 for Bulgaria, 1:1 after the regular time).One of the most passionate fans of the Bulgarian football team, Edward Friedman, atGiant stadium, July 5, Bulgaria vs. Mexico, 1994 FIFA cup.In this issueThe interviews and the articles included in this issue are all related toProf. Friedman’s main scientific and public interests.The interviewsI had the honor to address several well-known scientists with the requestto answer a couple of questions related to Prof. Ed Friedman’s activities andaccomplishments:Celebrating the 80th Anniversary of Professor Edward A. Friedman xviiSidney Altman, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry in 1989 for his workon the catalytic properties of RNA;Victor Lawrence, Distinguished Research Professor, Center for Intelli-gent Networked Systems at Stevens Institute of Technology;James E. McClellan III, Professor Emeritus of History of Science,College of Arts and Letters, Stevens Institute of Technology;Charles D. Ferguson, President of the Federation of American Scien-tists, the leading organization of scientists providing non-partisan information tothe US government and public on nuclear weapons and other strategic issues.The interview with Victor Lawrence was on the phone, and the remaininginterviews were through e-mail.As for the interview with Dr. Ferguson, I did not feel qualified enoughto interview one of the “Fifteen People the Next President Should Listen To”(as he was named in 2008 by Wired magazine). Therefore I asked Dr. SolomonPassy to take the role of the interviewer in his capacity of foreign minister ofBulgaria (2001–2005), Chairman-in-Office of the Organization for Security andCo-operation in Europe in 2004, and co-author of the hybrid logical machinery.Moni (as I called him many years ago when he was my student in calculus)accepted this role with pleasure because of their common interests and expertisein both science and politics, and their contacts with Prof. Friedman.The articlesIn his article “The human impact factor in the research and developmentof educational software” Pavel Boytchev casts a glance at the educational soft-ware he has developed in a constructionist spirit directly or indirectly under theimpact of Edward Friedman.Petar Kenderov and Toni Chehlarova provide examples of extendingthe class of problems solvable in school by means of computer modeling andpresent the results of an experiment with such problems in the context of thecontest Viva Mathematics with Computer.Edward Friedman shares his involvement in a recent educational exper-iment held in the US within a troubled inner-city school system and successfullytransferred to the highly impoverished areas of Sub-Saharan Africa.The article by Roumen Nikolov et al. presents the authors’ vision oflearning in a smart city environment.xviii Celebrating the 80th Anniversary of Professor Edward A. FriedmanRadoslav Yoshinov and Monka Kotseva focus on the role of thee-facilitator in school in the Inspiring Science Education environment.Petar Gaydarov and Konstantin Delchev present their research onTuran’s problem on the maximal distance of a polynomial to the set of all irre-ducible polynomials. Petar started this research in the frame of the High SchoolInstitute of Mathematics and Informatics, affiliated with IMI—BAS, in which heworked under the guidance of Konstantin. Later it became the basis for Petar‘sparticipation in RSI and the European Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS).The contribution of Petya Asenova deals with the informatics educa-tion in Bulgaria and various forms of support that young Bulgarian informaticianshave been getting through the years. Prof. Friedman’s impressions of the Bulgar-ian educational system are also reflected in the context of an interview she gotfrom him in 1993 for the newspaper Uchitelsko delo (Teacher’s cause).The last two articles are intended for a wider audience:Solomon Passy presents his vision on the role of AI and the Internet foran enlightened voting—a topic which is extremely important for both U.S. andBulgaria, in view of the current Presidential elections in the two countries.In his speech in the aula of Sofia University on the occasion of his receiv-ing the Doctor Honoris Causa title, Edward Friedman makes an interestingconnection between St. Cyril and Edison. (The speech is published in English forthe first time.)In conclusionOn behalf of the whole editorial board I would like to congratulate Profes-sor Edward Friedman on his 80th anniversary and wish him warmly good health,happiness in his private life and further success in his extraordinary rich andproductive scientific and public life!Evgenia SendovaEditor-in-charge

Celebrating the 80th Anniversary of Professor Edward A. Friedman, Scientist and Educator

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Celebrating the 80th Anniversary of Professor Edward A. Friedman, Scientist and Educator

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