The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson

Math “constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world,”

It is “the instrument through which the weak mind of man can most effectually read his Creator’s works.”

“It is the Combining faculty. It brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions in new, original, endless, ever-varying combinations. . . . It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.”25

which harked back to the Frankenstein story produced by Mary Shelley after that weekend with Lord Byron.

“but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”

But the main lesson to draw from the birth of computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources. Only in storybooks do inventions come like a thunderbolt, or a lightbulb popping out of the head of a lone individual in a basement or garret or garage.

John Bardeen.

Pat Haggerty

Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful product. Nolan

“Man-Computer Symbiosis,”

Innovation is driven by people who have both good theories and the opportunity to be part of a group that can implement them.