Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists

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Summary: Inside Their Minds
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Dry in places
Review: If you are heavily into computer science then you will find this book very interesting and informative.

However I'm more interested in the stories behind the people rather than learning about the mathematical problems they solved. In this area I felt the book didn't quite live up to its promise. Sure there's background stuff provided, but much space is also given over to describing the problems they were trying to solve (and most of these problems were mathematical in nature (ie the Nondeterministic Polynominal (NP) problem)).

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Summary: A fascinating, readable book.
Review: The authors interviewed 15 computer scientists and summarized their lives and their major technical contributions. There are fascinating details about the researchers' backgrounds (e.g. some were good students, but others flunked out) and very clear descriptions of their work. The people chosen span the field, from theory (Rabin, Cook, Levin) to computer design (Fred Brooks, Burton Smith, Hillis) to AI (McCarthy, Lenat). A great introduction to computer science for general readers, but also a lot of fun for techies. Highly recommended!

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Summary: Great subject, pitiful writing
Review: 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.

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Summary: With a title like this...
Review: With a title like this, I had to buy it! Anyhow, this focuses on topics and the history of computer science by dealing with some of the key computer scientists. I expected Turing to be one of them, but they deliberately focused on ones who were still alive and available to be interviewed. This included such notables as John McCarthy (LISP), Alan C. Kay (the Dynabook), Edsger Dijsktra (GO-TOs considered harmful), Donald Knuth (The Art of Computer Programming), and Frederick Brooks (The Mythical Man-Month). I was a bit frustrated at first at what seemed to be annoying inaccuracies (word sizes of 8-32 decimal digits? what about binary?). But overall it seems to cover computer science topics well and delve into difficult ones with some depth, including ones I couldn't figure out!

The organization is interesting, beginning with the issue of simply how to program a computer (the development of Fortran and LISP), moving on to the development of algorithms (Dijkstra and Knuth), new computer architectures, and, finally, artificial intelligence.

It concludes with two short chapters, strangely titled "Epilogue" and "Postscript." (It seems a little odd to have two such titles at the end of the same book.) The former reviews progress so far, and the latter makes some predictions about the future.

Rating:
Summary: Not only weak but not representative
Review: 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.