Out of their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists [Paperback]

Dennis Shasha (Author), Cathy Lazere (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0387982698 | ISBN-13: 978-0387982694 | Publication Date: July 2, 1998

This best-selling book is now available in an inexpensive softcover format. Imagine living during the Renaissance and being able to interview that eras greatest scientists about their inspirations, discoveries, and personal interests. The latter half of our century has seen its own Renaissance - informations technology has changed irrevocable the way we live, work, and think about the world. We are fortunate, therefore, that the authors of Out of Their Minds have been able to talk so candidly with the founders of computer science.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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

"...Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere have written a friendly and informative guide to a group of scientists who have...greatly shaped the world we take for granted." -Chris Goodrich -- Los Angeles Times

"A fascinating collection of profiles and interviews with some of the men...who brought us [to the computer age]." -L.R. Shannon -- The New York Times

... lucidly written, consistently interesting, full of beautiful insights, examples, and stories, and generally inspiring. Also, lots of fun. -- David Gelernter, Yale University

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 302 pages
• Publisher: Springer (July 2, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0387982698
• ISBN-13: 978-0387982694
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #353,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #75 in Books > Computers & Technology > Business & Culture > Biographies

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Computer Scientists are People, April 8, 2005

By 

calmly - See all my reviews

This review is from: Out of their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists (Paperback)

At about 15 pages per computer scientist, you get brief but often substantive introductions to some key figures in computer science. For those that intrigue you, you can then look elsewhere, but from this book alone you can get a good feel for some of the key problems computer scientists have addressed. You'll also get a good feeling for what these scientists were like as people and how they thought. Quotes from interviews with each gets you closer to them.

People who were just names to me get a chance to come alive. Some seemed quite likable, like John Backus (who I'd only known as the "B" in BNF) and Egdger Dijksra (who's a lot more than a warning against goto's). All are challenging thinkers who made some very hard things seem easier: Lamport especially seemed to have had a knack for simplifying some hard problems. But it's hardly all that simple and some of the discussions of their work took me some careful reading and re-reading to get a handle on.

This book delivers with its combination of showing these scientists as human beings and introducing some of the great challenges of computer science. If you're a programmer too often busy with boring work, this may be your chance to get back in touch with some fascinating discoveries. If you're not a computer scientist, even though some of the discussions may be rough going, there's plenty of good material to acquaint you with what computer scientists do and how intriguing it can be. 15 pages may not seem enough to get to know any scientist (I could have used more on Alan Kay and John McCarthy) but, as a introduction, this book comes thru strong, capturing much of the excitement that you never suspect if you just see rows of programmers in cubicles typing away.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The right mix of biography and science; highly readable, October 31, 2000

By 

Richard Snodgrass (Tucson, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Out of their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists (Paperback)

Writings on computer science celebrate the passive voice, the obtuse formalism, the multitude of graphs with dashed and dotted and dashed-dotted lines and tiny legends. While sometimes of interest to researchers, this literature is entirely foreign to those outside that clique, not because computers are irrelevant, but because the ideas behind the information revolution have been presented in an intentionally stilted and impersonal manner. The same enforced distance characterizes technical books. As Alan Lightman observes in the January 1999 issue of Atlantic Monthly, "Modern textbooks on science give no sense that scientific ideas come out of the minds of human beings. Instead science is portrayed as a set of current laws and results, inscribed like the Ten Commandments by some immediate but disembodied authority." Cathy Lazere and Dennis Shasha break from that tradition in this compelling book. Here we find that, unlike mathematics and theoretical physics, for which intellectual breakthroughs generally are made by the very young, "Rabin invented randomized algorithms in his forties; McCarthy invented nonmonotonic logics in his fifties, Backus worked on functional languages and Dijkstra developed new methods for mathematical proofs in their sixties." We come to understand that Danny Hillis' fascination of neuroanatomy provided telling analogies for his work on massively parallel machines. We are surprised that Stephen Cook did not foresee the widespread applicability of NP-Completeness, that John Backus thought Fortran might be useful for a single IBM machine model, rather than as the first truly platform-independent programming language. We get caught up in the adrenaline of Alan Kay's design of Smalltalk, simplifying it until a complete definition could fit on one page; the intrigue of making connections between disparate fields, as Leslie Lamport did between special relativity and distributed systems; the frustration of the initial disparagement by those who didn't understand the insight or its implications, as John McCarthy experienced when he published his first serious paper on artificial intelligence. Lazere and Shasha's book will be of interest to scientists and nonscientists alike: they give enough of the background of the discoveries to make them understandable to the general public, while providing the fascinating human context and involvement so missing from other sources. "Out of Their Minds" is just the right mix of biography and science, highly readable, and astonishing in its breadth. It is a wonderful book, full of wonder.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It takes one to know one, September 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Out of their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists (Paperback)

From a professor who has contributed extensively to Computer Science and who has his own share of idiosyncrasies, comes this wonderful book about the anecdotes in the lives of 15 of the greatest computer scientists. It takes a compelling, at the same time intriguing, look at how great minds arrived at the great thoughts that have changed the face of Computer Science today.