A Mind at Play

May 1, 2017
A key figure in the development of digital technology has his achievements, if not his personality, burnished in this enlightening biography. Journalists Soni and Goodman, authors of Rome’s Last Citizen, explore Claude Shannon’s breakthroughs as a scientist at MIT and Bell Labs in the 1930s and ’40s in electronics and telecommunications. His noteworthy discoveries include a way to rationally design circuits using Boolean algebra, and information theory, which understands communications as bits and shows how to compress them and remove noise—methods that underlie DVDs, the Internet, and much else. The authors’ rundown of the science behind these advances, probing everything from the structure of language to the transatlantic telegraph, is lucid and fascinating. Unfortunately, Shannon’s retiring demeanor and uneventful life don’t make for a dramatic narrative. The authors’ interpretation that Shannon’s mental “playfulness” stimulated his scientific creativity also seems misconstrued: his serious accomplishments were achieved before the age of 33, when he was working at assigned tasks; during his later life he pursued various interests—whimsical robots, chess-playing machines, a scientific study of juggling—but achieved nothing noteworthy. Still, Soni and Goodman open an engrossing window onto what a mind hard at work can do. Agent: Laura Yorke, Carol Mann Agency.

May 15, 2017
The life of the man called "the father of information theory."Claude Shannon (1916-2001) made a contribution of signal importance to the modern world when he was only 21: he divined that instead of using mechanical switches, a modern computer would better employ electrical switches that, quite apart from simply controlling electrical flow, could also, "in principle, perform a passable imitation of a brain." That is, a machine could be designed to use logic. This scientific insight, write former Huffington Post managing editor Soni and journalist/speechwriter Goodman, co-authors of Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar (2012), ranks among the most important of the 20th century. Shannon went on to work in wartime cryptography and met fellow mathematician Alan Turing, but each was so constrained by security clearances that they could not compare notes and do something even bigger and better than Enigma and other projects. This account lacks a little of the spark and scientific depth of, say, Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, but it covers the bases well. The authors write fluently, for instance, of how Boolean logic influenced Shannon's discovery: "And because Boole had shown how to resolve logic into a series of binary, true-false decisions, any system capable of representing binaries has access to the entire logical universe he described." They go on to describe some of Shannon's later discoveries, including a kind of algebra of genetics that might have been too much ahead of its time, as well as his considerable eccentricities. Shannon spent much of his later life tinkering rather than producing work approaching his youthful contributions. Still, readers will be intrigued by a mad scientist who rode the halls of Bell Labs atop a unicycle while juggling, a feat at which he did not excel. A welcome and inspiring account of a largely unsung hero--unsung because, the authors suggest, he accomplished something so fundamental that it's difficult to imagine a world without it.

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June 1, 2017

Rather than limit their characterization of Claude Shannon (1916-2001) to his identity as the father of information theory, Soni, a former editor for the New York Observer and Washington Examiner, and Goodman, who has contributed to Slate, the Atlantic, and other publications (coauthors, Rome's Last Citizen), deftly illustrate how personality, humility, courage, and, above all, curiosity facilitated his historical contributions. In addition to sympathizing with Shannon's awestruck colleagues and starstruck graduate students, readers will come away with a feeling of having gotten to know the man personally. This biography follows its subject from his small-town roots up to his work at the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Defense Research Committee, and Bell Labs. It demonstrates that his triumphs in the fields of engineering, math, biology, and information theory are more frequently discussed than how he accomplished these feats: by treating everything interesting as important, stripping away superfluous details, and intuiting the nature of a problem. VERDICT For historians, philosophers, cryptographers, geeks, introverts, and anyone who has ever taken something apart to understand how it works.--Ricardo Laskaris, York Univ. Lib., TorontoTasty vegan cheese variations; activism under fire; the curious Claude Shannon

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