Donald MacCrimmon MacKay


Donald MacCrimmon MacKay was a British physicist, and professor at the Department of Communication and Neuroscience at Keele University in Staffordshire, England, known for his contributions to information theory and the theory of brain organisation.

Education

MacKay was educated at Wick High School and St Andrews University, and gained a PhD at King's College London. In the late 1940s MacKay was among the first members of the Ratio Club.

Personal life

Married to Valerie Wood, they had five children. His oldest son is Robert Sinclair MacKay, a professor of mathematics at the University of Warwick; his youngest son was David J. C. MacKay, a professor of physics at the University of Cambridge. He died within a year of giving the 1986 Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow.

Quotes

In our age, when people look for explanations, the tendency more and more is to conceive of any and every situation that we are trying to understand by analogy with a machine.

God's way of working has been slow and gradual, is all that is meant by the term 'evolution' as used in science. In this technical, scientific sense the idea is theologically neutral, and is widely accepted by biologists who are also biblical Christians. Nothing in the Bible rules it out.

Selected publications

MacKay authored several publications. A selection:
  • MacKay, Donald MacCrimmon, , Nature 159 : 406–407. 1947
  • Deeley, E. M., MacKay, D. M., , Nature 163 : 650-650. 1949
  • MacKay, Donald MacCrimmon, , Nature 180 : 849–850. 1957
  • MacKay, Donald MacCrimmon, , Mind, LXIX:31-40, 01 1960.
  • MacKay, Donald MacCrimmon, , Nature 192 : 739-740. 1961
  • MacKay, Donald MacCrimmon, and Michael Ellis Fisher. Analogue Computing at Ultra-High Speed: An Experimental and Theoretical Study. London: Chapman & Hall, 1962.
  • MacKay, Donald MacCrimmon. '. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1970.
  • MacKay, Donald MacCrimmon. ' InterVarsity Press. 1974.
  • MacKay, Donald MacCrimmon. Brains, Machines, and Persons. Collins, 1980.
  • MacKay, Donald MacCrimmon, and Valerie Mackay. Behind the Eye. Basil Blackwell, 1991.
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