A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni (PDF)

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Winner of the Neumann Prize for the History of Mathematics “We owe Claude Shannon a lot, and Soni & Goodman’s book takes a big first step in paying that debt.” —San Francisco Review of Books “Soni and Goodman are at their best when they invoke the wonder an idea can instill. They summon the right level of awe while stopping short of hyperbole.” —Financial Times “Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman make a convincing case for their subtitle while reminding us that Shannon never made this claim himself.” —The Wall Street Journal “A charming account of one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished scientists…Readers will enjoy this portrait of a modern-day Da Vinci.” —FortuneIn their second collaboration, biographers Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman present the story of Claude Shannon—one of the foremost intellects of the twentieth century and the architect of the Information Age, whose insights stand behind every computer built, email sent, video streamed, and webpage loaded. Claude Shannon was a groundbreaking polymath, a brilliant tinkerer, and a digital pioneer. He constructed the first wearable computer, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots. He also wrote the seminal text of the digital revolution, which has been called “the Magna Carta of the Information Age.” In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Soni and Goodman reveal Claude Shannon’s full story for the first time. With unique access to Shannon’s family and friends, A Mind at Play brings this singular innovator and always playful genius to life.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐My original review was quite harsh, to the point of being unfair, so I’m changing it considerably, and going from two stars to four.That review was largely a reaction to the authors’ style and focus. First impression: a breezy biography that glosses over much and pays too much attention to personality and anecdotes. This first impression was cemented in Chapter 4, which devotes only a brief discussion to how Shannon profoundly changed our world by building on the work of mathematician George Boole, thus creating the new discipline of logic circuits.I think the authors really missed the boat on this. This profound union of math and electrical engineering is given proper treatment in

⭐(even if that book is laden with mathematical detail). Oddly, the authors do cite that work in their bibliography, but skim over its substance in this chapter. This was a huge opportunity to demonstrate how a “playful mind” can leap the boundaries of various disciplines to create a new one, an opportunity lost, in my view.But they partly make up for it much, much later in Chapter 16 (titled “The Bomb”). Shannon’s work in communication theory gets the royal treatment by comparison, and the authors dive deep into the nuances and implications. I especially appreciate their coverage of Shannon’s rigor in approaching human communication as “probabilistic”, essential to cryptography, information storage and transmission, and overcoming signal noise with certainty. Well done.In between such nuggets there is much storytelling, I think often to excess. It’s not that I don’t like stories. I do, but well-told ones. There is enough seemingly random “amusing” detail here that I am often asking “Okay, why am I reading this? Where are we?” Thus my initial frustration and first impression. But plow on. There is more to the story than this multitude of vignettes.Another example of substance is in Chapter 21, wherein Shannon writes of his own work in the IRE Journal that “information theory has, in the last few years, become something of a scientific bandwagon”. This detail reflects an important historical development: the occasional excesses of scientific communities in their quest for funding, and how anyone’s work, including Shannon’s, can be “abused”. This helps explain why we still live with the troubled metaphor of DNA as “information”, a notion that may have blocked more progress than it has created. So, I also appreciate how the authors touch on this kind of intellectual “infection”, an important social dimension that likely would have been lost to writers of a purely scientific background. The modern western world is strange in one way: a belief in perfect scientific knowledge — a great illusion of our time, with some scientists going way overboard to create that illusion. (Example: the current discourse on artificial intelligence.)I give only four stars for just one reason: style. The authors have clearly done their homework and brought out many important threads of Shannon’s thinking and theorems, but I think the verbosity often gets in the way. It’s a tough topic, but perhaps a better editor could have elevated this read to much more than “pretty good”. So, here’s hoping for a second, revised edition.Having said all that, I was going to return it, but now I’m keeping it.

⭐A mind at play is a look into the life of Claude Shannon, the father of information theory. In terms of the history of science, those of more of an engineering focus have sometimes been overlooked and Shannon could be considered to be one of those who has fallen into this category. Modern communications networks are founded upon many many layers of ideas but information and coding theory are definitely foundational material to what our current technology utilizes. The authors take a look at Shannon’s life with a focus on his general disposition as well as accomplishments. One gets a sense of the great man’s life and personality as we as his technical accomplishments.The book is split into three parts beginning with his childhood in Michigan and the early years of computing. Shannon did his undergraduate work in Michigan before going to work with Vannevar Bush at MIT. The authors detail the attitudes of the engineering department and how they were practical tinkerers rather than academic engineers. This attitude was one that stayed with Shannon throughout his professional life.The authors also detail Shannon’s first marriage, his overlap with the incredible minds in Princeton at the institute of advanced study and the environment during the war. The authors move onto Shannon’s career at Bell Labs which was a unique institution where base scientific research was permitted independently of its commercial applicability. The company was an incredibly vibrant place and produced a large number of Nobel laureates. Also Shannon’s personal life is weaved in and the authors give the history of how he met his second wife. The authors discuss how Shannon’s professional responsibilities shrank as his fame was at its highs; the playful side of Shannon comes out as he spent hours mastering chess while employed at Bell Labs. The authors detail Shannon’s move to MIT and his teaching style; they endeavor to portray Shannon as brilliant but unstructured lecturer who inspired many but was not perfect for all students. They discuss at some length things like Shannon’s paper on juggling; again they used an example of something somewhat frivolous to highlight the nature of Shannon and his balance between serious academic and playful engineer.A Mind at Play is a good mixture of personal and professional history and one does get a good sense of Claude Shannon the man rather than just Claude Shannon the information theorist. I enjoyed reading the book but it will definitely disappoint the reader looking for some technical details. It is light on explaining what Shannon is really famous for and how it is used today. Worth the read for the personal side of things but definitely weak on anything else.

⭐Loved reading this biography of Claude Shannon.On top of writing a proper biography that has clearly had the benefit of significant support from its subject’s immediate family, the authors have produced a tremendous profile of Shannon’s character and personality. Furthermore, this book succeeds 100% in making the connection between his scientific achievements and his personal traits, such as his curiosity and modesty, to say nothing of his mischievousness.On a personal level, I found it interesting that he did not have much time for the “New Math” that his children were taught in school. As an amateur mathematician I find school math to be too much oriented toward “recipes,” but perhaps I must bow to America’s most intuitive tinkerer, father of the highly abstract communication theory and godfather of the connected era we live in. Also quite funny that he dealt in stocks.This is not a “professional biography” in the style of “Birth of a Theorem,” but the authors make a decent fist of covering that angle well for the layman. The technical bits that are explained are explained very well. For example, the authors walk you both through an example of the application of Boolean arithmetic to electrical circuits and through the relative lack of randomness in everyday language.My one gripe is that some of Shannon’s highest and most enduring achievements (for example his theorems on the limits of communication) are mentioned only in passing, perhaps because they are difficult to convey in everyday language. At a minimum, and for the sake of completeness, they ought to be in an appendix.

⭐Shannon was to say the least eccentric not the average inventor hero, though he was well lauded in his time. The book is very basic on the technicalities of Information Theory and would not be a a good primer in that respect. It’s a description, the obtainable facts, of his public life. He was such a singular man that it would be impossible to get deep into his psyche or psychology, though there are some reasonable inferences. The book presents Shannon’s considerable achievement of pulling all the technical strands together to enable modern virtual life.

⭐Just finished this book, and I have to say it was highly enjoyable. Brilliant sources and historical references. Do yourself a favour and treat yourself to a copy of this book. What a Magnificent man (and kudos to his wife Betty and child Peggy), brilliant stories, and thank you for a chapter on one of my heroes Norbert Wiener what fantastic historical events this book covers with a modern genius that was Shannon of our recent times.

⭐Good Quality, Would repeat

⭐A long overdue biography of the man who shaped our modern world.

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