George Dyson

George Dyson is a historian of technology whose interests have included the development (and redevelopment) of the Aleut kayak (Baidarka, 1986), the evolution of digital computing and telecommunications (Darwin Among the Machines, 1997), and the exploration of space (Project Orion, 2002).

His forthcoming Turing’s Cathedral (Pantheon-USA/Penguin-UK) is “a creation myth for the digital universe” that illuminates the transition from numbers that mean things to numbers that do things, precipitated by John von Neumann’s bringing engineers into the den of the mathematicians, instead of mathematicians into a den of engineers.