Jimmy Soni, Rob Goodman
Biography, computers
Claude Shannon was the Isaac Newton of information theory--and that's not an exaggeration; he reified and measured the concept of "information" much as Newton made sense of force and acceleration. Unlike Newton, he seems to have been a genuinely playful and sweet-natured man. After revolutionizing communication, he rode unicycles, taught himself to juggle, and built whimsical machines--like the box with the switch on top; when the switch was turned on, a mechanical arm emerged, turned off the switch, and retracted.
A Mind at Play is not a super-dense book, either as biology or as mathematics. Its core is a very nice summary, very light on mathematics, of just what it was that Shannon did. I think the authors missed a couple of tricks for the more knowledgeable reader--the deep connections between information entropy and physical entropy go unacknowledged--but the book is well-written and provides a good, sympathetic character portrait.
Among the good books that overlap with A Mind at Play are:
- The Innovators, Walter Isaacson
- The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner
- The Information, James Gleick (much more technically rich)
The Information was full of information, but I found it hard going -- the prose was so dry that reading it practically made me thirsty.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I didn't have that reaction, but my professor uncle did. I suspect that the difference is that I already knew a lot of the basics.
ReplyDeleteThe authors of A Mind at Play are journalists, and they explicitly saying that they're "writing up". That is, rather than starting with deep technical knowledge and trying to explain it to the plebs, they're starting from ignorance and trying to communicate what they've learned.