Love the mention of Sugar Bowl, but loved the details on the father of information theory even more.

This is an absolutely delightful biography of a great, if relatively unknown man. Its subject, Claude Shannon, can rightfully be called the inventor of the computer and all that has come from it

Why?

Because he is the man who first thought that all information could be rendered.as a series of on-off switches and, what is more, he developed the formulas for transmitting this information through any medium. As amazing as that is (and it's really amazing) he did it as a young man and continued to make interesting discoveries in many fields of engineering and applied mathematics.

The book does an outstanding job of portraying Shannon throughout his life and relies greatly on interviews and primary sources. Unlike many other scientific biographies, it wears the tech stuff lightly. You don't have to be a nerd to enjoy this book.

Many scientific concepts are explained in simple laymen's terms before delving into Shannon's contributions to the fields. Only two chapters in the entire book go into much technical detail and these are on his important formulae. Even so they are nowhere near as technical as one might expect.

I loved this biography and the picture it painted of.a delightful man.

If you are reading this on any sort of electronic gadget, thank Claude Shannon. Though never as famous as some of his colleagues, Shannon was responsible for the mathematics and logic that made modern electronics possible. He was, like many geniuses, somewhat of an aloof and difficult character, and didn’t go out of his way to seek publicity.

=== The Good Stuff ===

* I don’t suppose there is any such thing as an “intimate portrait” of Claude Shannon. He simply wasn’t that type of man. Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman do about as credible a job as possible of peering through the veil, but much of the “personal” side of Shannon come from indirect sources, and is based on a mix of conjecture and guesstimates.

* You can’t understand Shannon’s genius without understanding some of the concepts of Electrical and Computer engineering. The authors do a nice job of explaining enough of the basics in layman’s language so that at least the general sense of Shannon’s brilliance comes through. I am an electrical engineer, and was familiar with Shannon’s work, but even I was impressed with how far and wide his skills took him. For example, Shannon took a bit of a vacation to work in a biology project or two, and came close to some fundamental breakthroughs in analyzing genetics.

*Probably the most interesting part of Shannon’s life were his many interests. It was not unusual to see him pedaling through Bell Labs on a custom-made unicycle, or one built for especially for juggling, and he was noted for spending time on music, analyzing chess games, or any other of his many hobbies. An interesting sidebar to the story is that this was tolerated at Bell Labs-almost as a recognition for the great work he had done early in his career.

* The author’s try to give a balanced look at Shannon’s life. It was not a completely happy life, and perhaps saddest of all, his mental faculties left him before he had a chance to truly see the digital and internet age which his work enabled.

=== The Not-So-Good Stuff ===

* I don’t envy the authors the task of creating a biography of Shannon suitable readable by a non-technical audience. This forces them into some strange compromises of trying to explain technical concepts in such a way to be simple enough for everyone to understand, but not so tedious as to alienate more techy readers. At times, they were more successful at this than others, but it is a fine line which they occasionally crossed. For example, technically-oriented readers, who I suspect is the true audience for this book, might be put off by explanations of simple switch-networks.

* Much of Shannon’s genius was his ability to work in both the theoretical and real-life world. The authors spend quite a bit of time discussing this, but I think shortchange Shannon a bit in describing just how rare and valuable this trait is.


=== Summary ===

I admit, I was hooked before I started the book. Claude Shannon is a man who amazes me, and I knew a bit about him from previous reading. He was an amazing man, and it would be tough to write an uninteresting biography of him. The authors did an excellent job, and handled a difficult subject and complicated material quite well. I would recommend the book to any “geek”, or anyone with an interest in how the technology of computers and advanced electronics got to where it is.

For years, I have been reading references to Claude Shannon because of his involvement in so many critical developments in science, communications, Bell Labs, and even the stock market. About his sense of humor or his riding a unicycle through Bell Labs – while juggling (a favorite hobby). And about his groundbreaking, earth-shaking realization that all communication, from voice to music to documents to photos – is all data and could be treated the same way. Without this insight, I could not post this review today. But there was no way to get my fill of Claude Shannon – no biographies or documentaries of an American genius who lived until 2001! A Mind At Play begins to fill this yawning gap (and it seems a documentary is finally in the works as well).

Shannon was a natural. He simply did. Whatever caught his eye. He invented machines all his life, designed them, machined them, theorized their optimization, and cleared the air on numerous topics that concerned them. His great gift to us was his reductionism. He could look at a problem and strip away the redundancies, the tangents, the superfluities – and the noise. Especially the noise. The bare core that was left was now addressable and solvable. With that, he could add back the other factors as needed. It made his solutions elegant. This clarity of vision is dispiritingly rare. That a man of his many other abilities had it has benefitted the world disproportionately.

He was in it for the intellectual challenge. While other scientists won Nobel Prizes, fame, fortune, privilege and rank, Shannon shunned the limelight and kept working (and playing). “Down to Earth” doesn’t begin to describe him. His toy room served him to the end. He hated speeches, and preferred playing the clarinet (or chess) to lecturing. This was in no way a stock-standard scientist. His brilliance was evident to everyone throughout his long life. And he worked with all of the most brilliant.

My favorite story in the book is when his young daughter brought out a package of toothpicks and dropped them all over the wood plank floor. Rather than scold her or instruct her to clean it right up, Shannon observed: ”You know, you could calculate the value of pi from that.” I also liked the index finger he installed in the basement toy room. When his wife wanted him to come upstairs, she pulled the cord in the kitchen and the finger curled upward. This man makes for a fascinating biography.

Among his great discoveries was how to eliminate noise. Noise in the transmission of data corrupts it, making the message incomplete, wrong or unintelligible. Shannon broke down elements to their smallest, and assigned them numeric labels. If you gave (say) a letter a two digit equivalent, you would get a wrong letter if one of the digits was blurred by noise. By giving them longer strings of digits, they could tolerate noise and still be correct at the receiving end. This sort of outside the box thinking revolutionized countless industries.

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

David Wineberg