Book cover of A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

Book description

Winner of the Neumann Prize for the History of Mathematics

**Named a best book of the year by Bloomberg and Nature**

**'Best of 2017' by The Morning Sun**

"We owe Claude Shannon a lot, and Soni & Goodman’s book takes a big first step in paying that debt."…

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Why read it?

1 author picked A Mind at Play as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

You’ve heard of Einstein, Turing, Newton, and Hawking - but do you know who Claude Shannon is? Would you be surprised if I told you that he’s probably done more for our current way of life than all of the others combined? It’s true, and it’s unbelievable.

Claude Shannon was a quiet, quirky man who had what you might call The Most Genius Move of the last forever years: he took an obscure discipline of mathematics (Boolean Algebra) and applied it to electrical circuits, creating the digital circuit in the process. If you’ve ever wondered how 1s and 0s…

From Rob's list on self-taught programmers.

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