Turings Cathedral Vintage
A Wall Street Journal Best Business Book of 2012 A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012 In this revealing account of how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II, George Dyson illuminates the nature of digital computers, the lives of those who brought them into existence, and how code took over the world. In the 1940s and ‘50s, a small group of men and women—led by John von Neumann—gathered in Princeton, New Jersey, to begin building one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing’s vision of a Universal Machine. The codes unleashed within this embryonic, 5-kilobyte universe—less memory than is allocated to displaying a single icon on a computer screen today—broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things, and our universe would never be the same. Turing’s Cathedral is the story of how the most constructive and most destructive of twentieth-century inventions—the digital computer and the hydrogen bomb—emerged at the same time.
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What Hacker News says
- highly recommend reading: Turings Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson[0]
it covers von Nuemann’s time developing the IAS machine at Princeton.
[0] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44425/turings-cathe...
- "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe" is the best I've read.
https://www.amazon.com/Turings-Cathedral-Origins-Digital-Uni...
- Also worth mentioning is "Turings Cathedral" by George Dyson
- Most of mine are going to be books by philosophers or scientists (about philosophy or other things).
- The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell was a pretty good one. He has a lot of ideas that were ahead of their time (positive psychology, etc). You can see a lot of parallels between his ideas and modern Stoicism (although Russell criticized it elsewhere, I think he came to some of the same conclusions).
- Introduction To Mathematical Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. Another Russell one. I think this is probably the clearest and easiest to understand explanation I've ever read of the underpinnings of mathematical foundations. It's written in a style that should be accessible to almost anyone with a high school education. He wrote it while he was in prison (for refusing to be drafted) during WW1. Apparently he left a copy of it to the prison warden.
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume. This is worth reading because it is the motivation for basically all of modern philosophy of science (at least in the west). It's also pretty easy to read and if you read it you'll be able to more easily understand other books and papers that are responses to it.
- Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson. This book should be required reading for every programmer or aspiring programmer IMO. I learned so much about the history of computing that I didn't know before reading this. You will not regret buying this one.
- I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. Obviously everyone knows about GEB, but he also wrote a shorter follow up that in my opinion expresses his ideas much more clearly. I think that even if you disagree with him, it's worth reading because there are so many things you can take away from this book. For example, he talks about his wife's death, and ties that into his theory of mind and explains the unstated purposes of why we have funerals/wakes for people.
- An Introduction to Information Theory by John R. Pierce. For someone like me who doesn't really have a very strong math background, this was a very clear intro to the ideas behind information theory, and why they're important historically. I would recommend this to anyone who feels like they need a gentle intro to the ideas and motivation for them. Dover mathematics books in general are great.
- Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Louis Hyman. This is a fantastic historical overview of personal credit in the US that covers the past 120 years or so. I learned a ton from reading this that I had no clue about. Recommended to anyone who wants to understand the origins of credit cards / loans, and how society came to embrace being in debt.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.222834/page/n7
https://people.umass.edu/klement/imp/imp-ebk.pdf
https://archive.org/details/humeenquiry00humerich/page/n7
https://www.amazon.com/Turings-Cathedral-Origins-Digital-Uni...
https://www.amazon.com/Am-Strange-Loop-Douglas-Hofstadter/dp...
https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Information-Theory-Symbo...
https://www.amazon.com/Borrow-American-Debt-Louis-Hyman/dp/0...
- Turings Cathedral by George Dyson is fantastic https://books.google.com/books/about/Turing_s_Cathedral.html...
- Gleick's "The Information" and Dyson's "Turing's Cathedral" would be 2 other good pop sci books on the origins of CS.
https://www.amazon.com/Information-History-Theory-Flood/dp/1...
https://www.amazon.com/Turings-Cathedral-Origins-Digital-Uni...
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