Fourmilab
John Walker moved to Switzerland in 1991, after having lived almost twenty years in California. He now engages in personal projects, including a hardware random number generator called HotBits and his Earth and Moon viewer. He publishes on his personal domain, fourmilab.ch (after his nickname for his personal workshop, "Fourmilab"). John is also known for his efforts in the 196 Palindrome Quest, by taking it to 1,000,000 digits.
John Walker's interest for artificial life prompted him to hire Rudy Rucker, a mathematician and science fiction author, for work on Cellular Automata software. Rudy later drew from his experience at Autodesk, in Silicon Valley, for his novel The Hacker and the Ants where one of the characters is loosely based on John Walker. Part of the action in this book takes place in Switzerland in a very Fourmilab-like setting. Fourmi is the French word for ant and illustrates a facet of John Walker's sense of humor. Located near CERN, Fourmilab is a pun of Fermilab.
Read more about this topic: John Walker (programmer)