3 biographies to read in 2022

Claude Shannon, J.C.R Licklider, and Edward O. Thorp

I’m 8 weeks into life as a parent and it’s a rollercoaster. In the midst of the chaos, I’m getting plenty of time to read while breastfeeding.

My three favourite books of the year all interlink, telling the stories of mathematicians and scientists who used their academic research to reshape the worlds of communication, computing, and financial markets. While many biographies are dense and dry, these are engagingly written and a delightful way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

1. The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop

After years of staring at it on my bookshelf, I finally read The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop. It tells the story of the early days of computing through the biography of J.C.R Licklider, the individual who more than anyone else willed his vision of human-computer symbiosis into existence.

J.C.R Licklider was a psychologist who fell in love with computers and their potential. Coming to computing from psychology, rather than mathematics or engineering, he instinctively saw computers in relation to the workings of the human brain, rather than as pure technology. This explains why he, in contrast to his peers, envisioned computers not as large calculators but as a way of enhancing human creativity and enriching human life.

This newsletter is called Making Connections to connect ideas and people. J.C.R Licklider was the master of this, using his positions at MIT, BBN and ARPA to cultivate communities of researchers and inspire (and fund) them to do their best work.

Connecting Ideas:

“The time-sharing technology he pushed so relentlessly would turn out to be the evolutionary ancestor of both personal computing and local-area networking, as well as a test bed for all the issues of on-line social behavior that would reemerge a generation later. The computer-graphics experiments he funded so lovingly would likewise turn out to be important steps along the road to our current generation of high-resolution computer displays with their windows, icons, menus, and so on. And of course, Lick’s vision of an Intergalactive Network would be the direct inspiration for the Arpanet of the late 1960s, which would in turn evolve into the Internet of the 1990s.”

Connecting People:

“by creating a community of fellow believers, he guaranteed that his vision would live on after him. When he arrived at ARPA, in 1962, there was nothing more to “symbiotic” computing than a handful of uncoordinated development efforts scattered all across the country; by the time he left, in September 1964, he had forged those efforts into a nationwide movement that had direction, coherence, and purpose. Moreover, by putting so much of the agency’s money into research at universities, where most of it actually went to support students, he neatly co-opted a substantial portion of the rising generation.”

Not just a biography, The Dream Machine is a thorough history of the early days of computer hardware, software, graphics, artificial intelligence, and the internet.

Pair with: Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop which tells the story of the Santa Fe Institute and the emerging science of complexity theory and is still my favourite non-fiction book.

2. A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman.

The researchers pushing the boundaries of computing in the Dream Machine built on the work of Claude Shannon, the brilliant mathematician who laid the foundations of Information Theory in his 1937 master’s thesis A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits which proved that binary circuits could perform logic. After a decade using his nights and weekends to develop an underlying theory for the transmission of information while working at Bell Labs, he would go on to publish A Mathematical Theory of Communication in 1948 proving that the process of transmitting all information — telegraphs, radio, television, telephony — could be described in the same manner:

This biography tells the story of his life and explains the intellectual leaps Claude Shannon made in terms laypeople can understand.

Pair with: The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner. This history of AT&T’s research centre Bell Labs describes the environment that led to an astonishing number of inventions —from the transistor to the laser — over just a few decades.

3. A Man for All Markets: Beating the Odds, from Las Vegas to Wall Street by Edward O. Thorp

This is the autobiography of Edward O. Thorp, another mathematician who spent his life trying to solve puzzles with mathematics — whether in the casinos of Las Vegas or the trading floors of Wall Street.

He found fame with his discovery that by counting cards you could beat the house at Blackjack, sharing his insights with the world in Beat the Dealer. He also worked together with Claude Shannon while at MIT to develop the first wearable computer, a device to transmit information about roulette wheels when gambling in Las Vegas.

When he turned his attention to the financial markets Edward Thorp used his knowledge of probability theory and statistics to pioneer quantitative investing, discovering the options pricing formula that would later win Nobel Prizes for academics Robert Merton and Myron Scholes (co-author Fisher Black had passed away), and starting the first market-neutral hedge fund, which recorded 19 years of gains with just three months of losses.

This biography is filled with stories of a life well-lived exploring curiosity and applying mathematics to solve problems in the real world others thought impossible.

Pair With: Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein — a comprehensive history of man's efforts to understand risk and probability, from ancient gamblers in Greece to modern chaos theory.