- Paperback: 302 pages
- Publisher: Springer; 1st ed. 1995. 2nd printing edition (July 2 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0387982698
- ISBN-13: 978-0387982694
- Product Dimensions: 2.3 x 1.6 x 0.2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 476 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#172,586 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #42 in Books > Computers & Internet > Business & Culture > Biographies
- #99 in Books > Computers & Internet > Business & Culture > History
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Over the past fifty years, most of computer science's important inventions have come from innovators who aren't exactly household names. Out of Their Minds describes the lives and discoveries of fifteen unsung computer scientists whose programs have done everything from help engineers manage factories to help cartoonists animate their characters. This well-paced book spans the varied disciplines of computer science and challenges the reader to think about still-unsolved questions: how can we build a computer that works like the human brain, how can we boost the speed of computation, and where all that intelligence and power will take the industry over the next fifty years.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
... lucidly written, consistently interesting, full of beautiful insights, examples, and stories, and generally inspiring. Also, lots of fun. -- David Gelernter, Yale University
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
Imagine that you are the chief engineer of a computer construction project shortly after World War II. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Imagine that you are the chief engineer of a computer construction project shortly after World War II. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Inside Their Minds,
This review is from: Out of their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists (Paperback)
Entering into dialogue with the leading scientists of our time is one of the best ways to understand and appreciate science. Yet the educated public is rarely presented with such opportunities. Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere's ^Out of Their Minds^ vicariously invites the reader into such a conversation with the leading scientists of the leading science of our time: Computer Science. The result is an engaging and informative book about the high-tech cognoscenti. Tutorial break-out boxes on related technical points make this an unusually useful book.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Great subject, pitiful writing,
By Stephane (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Out of their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists (Paperback)
This book is about some great people: McCarthy, Djikstra, Knuth, Brooks... The biography of any one of them could be a 500+ pages story that would read like a novel. If you recognized the names above, you're expecting a compendium of epic proportions. If you didn't, well... you should; these are the Newtons, the Einsteins of the computer age.The basic problem is that the authors are completely unable to convey any of this excitement. Reading the book, you feel as if they spent an afternoon talking to some boring old academic. Maybe they were bored; they definitely managed to convey THAT feeling. If you want an account of the history of computer science, you could try "The Dream Machine", which is about so much more than Licklider. At least it's readable.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not only weak but not representative,
By A Customer
This review is from: Out of their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists (Paperback)
To somebody outside of computer science this book may look outstanding. But anyone in the field will quickly recognize that scientists like Turin and von Neumann were left out while quite a few mediocre but popular ones were included. It seems that the authors were searching for the most popular and currently alive. Even if this was their criteria, they missed their target, since the choice could have been a lot better. The science itself is written in a pleasant way but lacks brilliance and deeper understanding. The human side of the scientists is also practically absent. The only goal that this book may claim to have reached is to impress and confuse naive readers. Hardly rewarding.
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