Sometime in 2002 a friend of mine asked me if I’d read a book by Neal Stephenson called Cryptonomicon. I said I hadn’t. I’d heard of other books that Stephenson had written, including Diamond Age and Snow Crash. He told me I would enjoy Cryptonomicon, which was published in 1999, because it dealt with cryptography…
I have been reading a lot about information theory these last two months. In the course of this reading, the same people keep showing up again and again. Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, J. C. R. Lichlider, Marvin Minsky, Norbert Wiener, and John McCarthy to name just a few. It is the last few…
I have just finished James Gleick’s fascinating book The Information on the history of information theory. It is a rare milestone book for me in that it is one of three books that have really pushed my ability to comprehend complex subjects to the limits. I say one of three books. I went through through…