Inventor-Author Ray Kurzweil to Speak at Penn State

Author, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil is scheduled to speak at 8 p.m. Tuesday in Penn State’s Schwab Auditorium.

His University Park appearance, part of the university’s annual Distinguished Speaker Series, will be free and open to the public, though tickets are required.

Tickets are available until 5 p.m. at Eisenhower Auditorium, until 6 p.m. at the Bryce Jordan Center ticket office, and until 6 p.m. at the Penn State Downtown Theatre Center on South Allen Street, State College.

Kurzweil is the author of the best-sellers ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines’ and ‘The Singularity is Near,’ among other books. Forbes, Inc., magazine has ranked him No. 8 among entrepreneurs in the U.S., and PBS has named him as one of ’16 Revolutionaries Who Made America,’ according to a Penn State news release.

On the technical side, Kurzweil has had a central role in the development of the CCD flat-bed scanner, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, and the first music synthesizer able to recreate orchestral-instrument sounds, among other achievements, Penn State noted.