Craig Silverstein

Craig Silverstein provides an introduction to proof techniques in HTML format (with a *.tex file available too).

He begins by stating,

DEEP DOWN, all theorems are of the form IF A THEN B. They may be expressed in some other way, such as ALL A ARE B or LET A BE TRUE. THEN B IS TRUE, but the goal in each case is to get from the assumptions — the A part — to the conclusions — the B part. To prove a theorem, you combine the assumptions with definitions and other theorems and show that the conclusion is always true. The hard part is figuring out what definitions and other theorems to use. Definitions and theorems let you convert statements to other statements; by stringing these definitions and theorems together you can convert the statements of A into the statements of B. This constitutes a proof.

"Morphology of Proof: An introduction to rigorous proof techniques" and the HTML conversion is dated 27 August 2005. However, there's a postscript version elsewhere on the Net that has the same text and is dated 26 September 1998.

His home page indicates he's a "Computer Science Ph.D. candidate" at Stanford. However, a 2006 bio indicates he seems to be a bit distracted:

Craig Silverstein was the first employee hired by Google's founders and created many of the original IT components to support Google's deployment and growth. Silverstein is currently on leave from Stanford University, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science, with a focus on information retrieval and data mining. Silverstein contributed his expertise in compression algorithms to Google while it was still a research project at Stanford. His other academic pursuits include super-efficient versions of basic data structures such as hash tables as well as efficient clustering of large data sets using Scatter/Gather and latent semantic indexing as it relates to clustering, which he explored at Xerox PARC.

Silverstein graduated with honors with a bachelor of science degree in computer science from Harvard College, from which he also received Phi Beta Kappa distinction, the Microsoft Technical Scholarship, and twice received the Derek Bok Award for Teaching Excellence.

According to a 2003 article, referring to Google co-founders Sergei Brin (misspelt in the following paragraph, taken from an on-line excerpt) and Larry Page,

Like Bin and Page, Silverstein is a Stanford graduate-school dropout. He claims he'll finish his computer science degree, however, only because he promised his mother he would. Since he was interested in search and information technology during his student days, Silverstein thought it was natural to go from grad school to Google. "I've been there since the beginning," he says. "It was a tiny little company that's grown to a much larger company, doing lots of things in information. It's not just search."
