Turing’s Cathedral: Micro Review
Here is my prediction — if you pick up this book and finish it, you are a history aficionado as well as a fan of computer science. I am both of that so I did end up finishing this book :)
George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral is a story about a group of brilliant mathematicians at the Institute of Advance Studies at Princeton who spearheaded the effort to build the earliest computers. The author delves into the lives of these men, their struggles, their brilliance and their politics as they help architect the most significant part of WWI and WWII through their mathematical magic and corresponding progress in designing the earliest computers.
A large portion of the book charters the life of John von Neuman and how he shaped not just the earlier computers but also had a huge hand in building the earliest nuclear weapons and the ICBMs for USA .
I of course know of him due to the fact that it was perhaps the first thing I (along with many other computer students) formally learn about computers: von Neuman architecture.
I am embarrassed to admit how little I knew before I read the book. My tryst with computer science history was perhaps 27 years ago when I read up one liner facts to study for a computer fair quiz. I dug up this certificate of “merit” from my archives to prove my point :) And many of us might have superficially read about the ENIAC, the UNIVAC and MANIAC as I did those 26 years ago. However, the author in this book goes into painstaking details about the lives of the people who built and used these very first computers. He describes the types of physical, mathematical and biological problems that these computers were applied to solve for and at the same time describe the personal & socio political events at the time. Besides von neumann, author delves into the lives, work and history of Nils Barricelli, Eckert & Mauchly, Marston Morse, Alan Turing and Veblens to name a few.
Its a recommended read if you love history, computer science and mathematics. In that order.
I will leave you with few nuggets from the book that I found interesting:
Three technological revolutions dawned in 1953: thermonuclear weapons, stored-program computers, and the elucidation of how life stores its own instructions as strings of DNA.
The new computer was assigned two problems: how to destroy life as we know it, and how to create life of unknown forms.
In March of 1953 there were 53 kilobytes of high-speed random access memory on planet earth.
“Nature conceals her secrets in the sublimity of her law, not through cunning” — Albert Einstein.
A third kingdom of mathematics was taking form. The first kingdom was the realm of mathematical abstractions alone. the second kingdom was the domain of numbers applied. In the third kingdom, the digital universe, numbers would assume a life of their own.
Its easier to write new code than to understand an old one. — John von Neumann to Marston Morse, 1952.
