A revision of the life and work of Ada Lovelace, which contains nearly 400 letters. She was Lord Byron's daughter and acted as interpretress for Charles Babbage, the computer pioneer. She was one of the first people to write programmes of instruction for
Scientific knowledge grows at a phenomenal pace--but few books have had as lasting an impact or played as important a role in our modern world as The Mathematical Theory of Communication, published originally as a paper on communication theory in the Bell
Jean-Pierre Dupuy, prophet of what he calls "enlightened doomsaying," has long warned that modern society is on a path to self-destruction. In this book, he pleads for a subversion of this crisis from within, arguing that it is our lopsided view of religi
The essence of the earth's beauty lies in chaos, in the disorder of grasses strewn in a meadow, the blotching of green lichen on a tree trunk. Eliot Porter's photographs of the natural world, spanning thirty-five years and five continents -- from an Antar
Here's some of what just happened: Millions of ordinary, sensible people came into possession of computers. These machines had wondrous powers, yet made unexpected demands on their owners. Telephones broke free of the chains that had shackled them to beds
An illuminating portrayal of Richard Feynman—a giant of twentieth century physics—from his childhood tinkering with radios, to his vital work on the Manhattan Project and beyondRaised in Depression-era Rockaway Beach, physicist Richard Feynman was irr
From the bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of Genius and Chaos, a bracing new work about the accelerating pace of change in today's world.Most of us suffer some degree of "hurry sickness," a malady that has launched us into the "epoch of t
The first volume in this annual series of the best writing by Americans, meticulously selected by bestselling author James Gleick, one of the foremost chronicles of scientific social history, debuts with a stellar collection of writers and thinkers. Man
In the Messenger Lectures, originally delivered at Cornell University & recorded for TV by the BBC, Feynman offers an overview of selected physical laws & gathers their common features into one broad principle of invariance. He maintains at the ou