A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

<b>The life and times of one of the foremost intellects of the twentieth century: Claude Shannon - the neglected architect of the Information Age, whose insights stand behind every computer built, email sent, video streamed, and webpage loaded.</b><br><br>Claude Shannon was a groundbreaking polymath, a brilliant tinkerer, and a digital pioneer. He constructed a fleet of customized unicycles and a flamethrowing trumpet, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots. He also wrote the seminal text of the digital revolution, which has been called &quot;the Magna Carta of the Information Age.&quot; His discoveries would lead contemporaries to compare him to Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. His work anticipated by decades the world we'd be living in today - and gave mathematicians and engineers the tools to bring that world to pass.<br> <br>In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman reveal Claude Shannon's full story for the first time. It's the story of a small-town Michigan boy whose career stretched from the era of room-sized computers powered by gears and string to the age of Apple. It's the story of the origins of our digital world in the tunnels of MIT and the &quot;idea factory&quot; of Bell Labs, in the &quot;scientists' war&quot; with Nazi Germany, and in the work of Shannon's collaborators and rivals, thinkers like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Vannevar Bush, and Norbert Wiener.<br> <br>And it's the story of Shannon's life as an often reclusive, always playful genius. With access to Shannon's family and friends, <i>A Mind at Play </i>brings this singular innovator and creative genius to life.