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Author: George Dyson
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 466
ISBN-13: 0375422773
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Documents the innovations of a group of eccentric geniuses who developed computer code in the mid-20th century as part of mathematician Alan Turin's theoretical universal machine idea, exploring how their ideas led to such developments as digital television, modern genetics and the hydrogen bomb.
Author: George Dyson
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 2012-03-06
Total Pages: 466
ISBN-13: 0307907066
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →“It is possible to invent a single machine which can be used to compute any computable sequence,” twenty-four-year-old Alan Turing announced in 1936. In Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson focuses on a small group of men and women, led by John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who built one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. Their work would break the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things—and our universe would never be the same. Using five kilobytes of memory (the amount allocated to displaying the cursor on a computer desktop of today), they achieved unprecedented success in both weather prediction and nuclear weapons design, while tackling, in their spare time, problems ranging from the evolution of viruses to the evolution of stars. Dyson’s account, both historic and prophetic, sheds important new light on how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II. The proliferation of both codes and machines was paralleled by two historic developments: the decoding of self-replicating sequences in biology and the invention of the hydrogen bomb. It’s no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time. How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan Turing’s one-dimensional model became John von Neumann’s two-dimensional implementation, Turing’s Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next.
Author: George Dyson
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2012-03-01
Total Pages: 432
ISBN-13: 0718194500
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →How did computers take over the world? In late 1945, a small group of brilliant engineers and mathematicians gathered at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their ostensible goal was to build a computer which would be instrumental in the US government's race to create a hydrogen bomb. The mathematicians themselves, however, saw their project as the realization of Alan Turing's theoretical 'universal machine.' In Turing's Cathedral, George Dyson vividly re-creates the intense experimentation, incredible mathematical insight and pure creative genius that led to the dawn of the digital universe, uncovering a wealth of new material to bring a human story of extraordinary men and women and their ideas to life. From the lowliest iPhone app to Google's sprawling metazoan codes, we now live in a world of self-replicating numbers and self-reproducing machines whose origins go back to a 5-kilobyte matrix that still holds clues as to what may lie ahead.
Author: George Dyson
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Published: 2020-08-18
Total Pages: 269
ISBN-13: 0374710074
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Named one of WIRED’s "The Best Pop Culture That Got Us Through 2020" In Analogia, technology historian George Dyson presents a startling look back at the analog age and life before the digital revolution—and an unsettling vision of what comes next. In 1716, the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent eight days taking the cure with Peter the Great at Bad Pyrmont in Saxony, trying to persuade the tsar to launch a voyage of discovery from Russia to America and to adopt digital computing as the foundation for a remaking of life on earth. In two classic books, Darwin Among the Machines and Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson chronicled the realization of the second of Leibniz’s visions. In Analogia, his pathbreaking new book, he brings the story full circle, starting with the Russian American expedition of 1741 and ending with the beyond-digital revolution that will complete the transformation of the world. Dyson enlists a startling cast of characters, from the time of Catherine the Great to the age of machine intelligence, and draws heavily on his own experiences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and onward to the rain forest of the Northwest Coast. We are, Dyson reveals, entering a new epoch in human history, one driven by a generation of machines whose powers are no longer under programmable control. Includes black-and-white illustrations
Author: Kenneth Brower
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Published: 2020-02-18
Total Pages: 316
ISBN-13: 168051279X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →“The Starship and the Canoe is neither a wilderness survival manual nor a book of blueprints. It is another of those rare books impossible to define: the kind that seeks you in time. And you will know it, live it, and consult it thereafter simply by name.” --Chicago Sun-Times “Brower’s superbly written book clutches at one’s imagination.” --Publishers Weekly “In the tradition of Carl Sagan and John McPhee, a bracing cerebral voyage past intergalactic hoopla and backwoods retreats.” --Kirkus Reviews Originally published in 1978, The Starship and the Canoe is the remarkable story of a father and son: Freeman Dyson is a world-renowned astrophysicist who dreams of exploring the heavens and has designed a spaceship to take him there. His son George, a brilliant high school dropout, lives in a treehouse and is designing a giant kayak to explore the icy coastal wilderness of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Author Kenneth Brower describes with stunning impact their lives and their visions of the world. It is a timeless tale framed by modern science, adventure, family, and the natural world.
Author: Bill Bryson
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2007-11-13
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 006136391X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today's most respected academics to eccentrics like Delia Bacon, an American who developed a firm but unsubstantiated conviction that her namesake, Francis Bacon, was the true author of Shakespeare's plays. Emulating the style of his famous travelogues, Bryson records episodes in his research, including a visit to a basement room in Washington, D.C., where the world's largest collection of First Folios is housed. Bryson celebrates Shakespeare as a writer of unimaginable talent and enormous inventiveness. His Shakespeare is like no one else's–the beneficiary of Bryson's genial nature, his engaging skepticism, and a gift for storytelling unrivalled in our time.
Author: Marina Whitman
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2012-08-31
Total Pages: 337
ISBN-13: 0472118420
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The memoir of Marina von Neumann Whitman
Author: Chris Bernhardt
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2016-05-13
Total Pages: 209
ISBN-13: 0262034549
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In 1936, when he was just twenty-four years old, Alan Turing wrote a remarkable paper in which he outlined the theory of computation, laying out the ideas that underlie all modern computers. This groundbreaking and powerful theory now forms the basis of computer science. In Turing's Vision, Chris Bernhardt explains the theory, Turing's most important contribution, for the general reader. Bernhardt argues that the strength of Turing's theory is its simplicity, and that, explained in a straightforward manner, it is eminently understandable by the nonspecialist. As Marvin Minsky writes, "The sheer simplicity of the theory's foundation and extraordinary short path from this foundation to its logical and surprising conclusions give the theory a mathematical beauty that alone guarantees it a permanent place in computer theory." Bernhardt begins with the foundation and systematically builds to the surprising conclusions. He also views Turing's theory in the context of mathematical history, other views of computation (including those of Alonzo Church), Turing's later work, and the birth of the modern computer. In the paper, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," Turing thinks carefully about how humans perform computation, breaking it down into a sequence of steps, and then constructs theoretical machines capable of performing each step. Turing wanted to show that there were problems that were beyond any computer's ability to solve; in particular, he wanted to find a decision problem that he could prove was undecidable. To explain Turing's ideas, Bernhardt examines three well-known decision problems to explore the concept of undecidability; investigates theoretical computing machines, including Turing machines; explains universal machines; and proves that certain problems are undecidable, including Turing's problem concerning computable numbers.
Author: Alain De Botton
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2012-03-06
Total Pages: 297
ISBN-13: 0307907104
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →What if religions are neither all true nor all nonsense? The long-running and often boring debate between fundamentalist believers and non-believers is finally moved forward by Alain de Botton’s inspiring new book, which boldly argues that the supernatural claims of religion are entirely false—but that it still has some very important things to teach the secular world. Religion for Atheists suggests that rather than mocking religion, agnostics and atheists should instead steal from it—because the world’s religions are packed with good ideas on how we might live and arrange our societies. Blending deep respect with total impiety, de Botton (a non-believer himself) proposes that we look to religion for insights into how to, among other concerns, build a sense of community, make our relationships last, overcome feelings of envy and inadequacy, inspire travel and reconnect with the natural world. For too long non-believers have faced a stark choice between either swallowing some peculiar doctrines or doing away with a range of consoling and beautiful rituals and ideas. At last, in Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton has fashioned a far more interesting and truly helpful alternative.
Author: George Dyson
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2012-03-29
Total Pages: 348
ISBN-13: 0718196953
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →'Full of historical anecdotes . . . but this is much more than a history book. [George Dyson] weaves his threads together for a purpose. Using voices of the past and present, he describes a fresh and sometimes startling viewpoint of the emerging relationship between nature and machines. From vignettes about Olaf Stapledon, George Boole, John von Neumann, and Samuel Butler, a larger story develops in which the twin processes of intelligence and evolution are inseparably intertwined' Danny Hillis, Wired
