The Logician and the Engineer – Paul J. Nahin ***

For its target readership this is an excellent book – and I have to say as someone outside that market I really enjoyed some parts – but the fact remains it is aimed at a pretty narrow segment. There’s even a little section at the front of the book that effectively says ‘read this to see if you can cope with the rest.’

The bits I found particularly appealing were a few introductory logic problems (though I’m not sure I agreed with all the conclusions) and the pocket biographies of mathematician George Boole and information engineer Claude Shannon. However, while technically qualified to deal with the other parts of the book, in truth I couldn’t be bothered – it was too much like hard work.

For bits of it I would have to wade through far too much grunt maths, and for other bits would have had to think far too hard about electronic circuits and the logic circuits beloved of basement dwellers on computer science courses. (Or was it just my university that confined the computer scientists to the basement?)

I think the author makes the mistake that many academics make when trying to write for a broader audience: they carry through too much of the textbook, and find that the aspects that often encourage people to remember things in that context (often because they involve repetitious grunt work) actually prevent popular science readers from getting the message. It’s a shame, because the subjects are interesting, but unless you are the kind of person who designs logic circuits for fun, this is probably not the book you’d want to see.

Hardback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune ) underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...

John and Mary Gribbin - Five Way Interview

Mary and John Gribbin are bestselling authors and science writers. As a pair, they have written several science books, including Being Human, Fire on Earth, major biographies of Richard Feynman and Robert Hooke plus Edmond Halley , and the 'in 90 minutes' series of biographies. Mary is a previous winner of the TES Junior Information Book Award and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sussex. John’s title Six Impossible Things was shortlisted for the 2019 Royal Society Science Book Prize and he is also a Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Astronomy at the University of Sussex. Their latest book is Against the Odds . Why this book? We enjoy writing biographies of scientists, which gives us particular scope to collaborate, with Mary rooting out the biographical background and John focussing on the science (although neither role is exclusive). We hadn't done one for a while, and particularly wanted to highlight a female scientist this time. But we had great troubl...

Search This Blog