Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

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 I, 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.

Dyson, George: - George Dyson, the son of distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson, grew up immersed in the world of groundbreaking science. His previous books include the acclaimed Darwin Among the Machines, He and his father are also the subjects of Kenneth Brower's dual biography, The Starship and the Canoe, Dyson lives in Washington State.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780375422775
ISBN 10	0375422773
Title	Turing's Cathedral
Author	George Dyson
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2012-03-06
Number of pages	432
Prizes	Winner of ALA Notable Books (Nonfiction) 2013, Commended for L.A. Times Book Prize (Science/Technology) 2012
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.