Piergiorgio Odifreddi

Italian mathematician, logician and aficionado of the history of science, who is also extremely active as a popular science writer and essayist, especially in a perspective of philosophical atheism as a member of the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics.

He is philosophically and politically near to Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky. He repeatedly manifested his opposition to US policies, in particular against that of George W. Bush and Israel, as indicated in his writings Non siamo tutti americani, La dannata Terra Santa and the controversial Intervista a Hitler, in his book Il matematico impertinente.

His views on Israel "immodestly inspired" by José Saramago and Noam Chomsky caused protests, which led to the deletion of an editorial he wrote in his blog at la Repubblica on November 2012, where he talked about the Israeli "incursion" in the Gaza Strip. In protest of the censorship, he decided to close his blog with a bitter post, eventually re-opening it years later.