A mind at play
"The life and times of one of the foremost intellects of the twentieth century: Claude Shannon--the architect of the Information Age, whose insights stand behind every computer built, email sent, video streamed, and webpage loaded. Claude Shannon was a groundbreaking polymath, a brilliant tinkerer, and a digital pioneer. He constructed a fleet of customized unicycles and a flamethrowing trumpet, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots. He also wrote the seminal text of the digital revolution, which has been called 'the Magna Carta of the Information Age.' His discoveries would lead contemporaries to compare him to Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. His work anticipated by decades the world we'd be living in today--and gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass. In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman reveal Claude Shannon's full story for the first time. It's the story of a small-town Michigan boy whose career stretched from the era of room-sized computers powered by gears and string to the age of Apple. It's the story of the origins of our digital world in the tunnels of MIT and the 'idea factory' of Bell Labs, in the 'scientists' war' with Nazi Germany, and in the work of Shannon's collaborators and rivals, thinkers like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Vannevar Bush, and Norbert Wiener. And it's the story of Shannon's life as an often reclusive, always playful genius.
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What Hacker News says
- I recommend Claude Shannon's biography called "A Mind At Play", by Sonni and Goodman.
- A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman reveal Claude Shannon’s full story for the first time. It’s the story of a small-town Michigan boy whose career stretched from the era of room-sized computers powered by gears and string to the age of Apple. It’s the story of the origins of our digital world in the tunnels of MIT and the “idea factory” of Bell Labs, in the “scientists’ war” with Nazi Germany, and in the work of Shannon’s collaborators and rivals, thinkers like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Vannevar Bush, and Norbert Wiener.
I also loved this one:
Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell
Exploding the Phone tells this story in full for the first time. It traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Phil Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of “phone phreaks” who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, the explosion of telephone hacking in the counterculture, and the war between the phreaks, the phone company, and the FBI.
- Shannon did a lot more interesting things than just this paper.
If you become more interested in Claude Shannon, I recommend the biography "A Mind At Play"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mind_at_Play
A very interesting person.
- * The Idea Factory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idea_Factory) includes info on Kelly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion) as well as Shannon.
* A Mind at Play (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mind_at_Play) is a bio of Shannon. I think a much better bio could be written, but this is all we have.
* "Information Theory" by Cover and Thomas is a mathematical introduction to information theory. This is a technical book, and is very different than the books above.
If you haven't yet done so, read Shannon's paper as linked above
- Fantastic book
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/725789.What_the_Dormouse...
Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34467030-troublemakers
A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32919530-a-mind-at-play
- Not yet covered by others:
The Code Book, by Simon Singh [History of Cryptography] The Idea Factory, by John Gertner [Bell Labs] The Information, by James Gleick [Shannon and Information Theory. I haven't read the mentioned A Mind at Play on the same subject]
