A Mind at Play Quotes

“In these days, when there is a tendency to specialize so closely, it is well for us to be reminded that the possibilities of being at once broad and deep did not pass with Leonardo da Vinci or even Benjamin Franklin.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“I don’t think I was ever motivated by the notion of winning prizes, although I have a couple of dozen of them in the other room. I was more motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together. Or what laws or rules govern a situation, or if there are theorems about what one can’t or can do. Mainly because I wanted to know myself.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“In one sense, the world seen through such eyes looks starkly unequal. “A very small percentage of the population produces the greatest proportion of the important ideas,” Shannon began, gesturing toward a rough graph of the distribution of intelligence. “There are some people if you shoot one idea into the brain, you will get a half an idea out. There are other people who are beyond this point at which they produce two ideas for each idea sent in. Those are the people beyond the knee of the curve.” He was not, he quickly added, claiming membership for himself in the mental aristocracy—he was talking about history’s limited supply of Newtons and Einsteins.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“How is logic like a machine? Here is how one logician explained it around the turn of the twentieth century: "As a material machine is an instrument for economising the exertion of force, so a symbolic calculus is an instrument for economising the exertion of intelligence." Logic, just like a machine, was a tool for democratizing force: built with enough precision and skill, it could multiply the power of the gifted and the average alike.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“There were two kinds of researchers at Bell Labs: those who are being paid for what they used to do, and those who are being paid for what they were going to do. Nobody was paid for what they were doing now.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“Robert said: ‘Oh my God!’ and Joe calmly replied, ‘Please don’t exaggerate, just call me Professor.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do and, even if their genius is unrecognized in their lifetime, the essential earthly reward is always theirs, the certainty that their work is good and will stand the test of time. One suspects that the geniuses will be least in the Kingdom of Heaven—if, indeed, they ever make it; they have had their reward.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“A Mathematical Theory of Communication” rapidly”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“I’m a machine and you’re a machine, and we both think, don’t we? —Claude Shannon”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: The Brilliant Life of Claude Shannon, Inventor of the Information Age

“universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence “unnatural,” but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“The messages that resolve the greatest amount of uncertainty—that are picked from the widest range of symbols with the fairest odds—are the richest in information.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“At Bush’s MIT, math and engineering were an extension of the metal shop and the woodshop, and students who were skilled with the planimeter and the slide rule had to be skilled as well with the soldering iron and the saw.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work—of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence “unnatural,” but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“fulsome,”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: The Brilliant Life of Claude Shannon, Inventor of the Information Age

“As the story goes, the manuscript that formed the outlines of Wiener’s contributions to information theory was nearly lost to humanity. Wiener had entrusted the manuscript to Walter Pitts, a graduate student, who had checked it as baggage for a trip from New York’s Grand Central Terminal to Boston. Pitts forgot to retrieve the baggage. Realizing his mistake, he asked two friends to pick up the bag. They either ignored or forgot the request. Only five months later was the manuscript finally tracked down; it had been labeled “unclaimed property” and cast aside in a coatroom. Wiener was, understandably, blind with rage. “Under these circumstances please consider me as completely dissociated from your future career,” he wrote to Pitts. He complained to one administrator of the “total irresponsibleness of the boys” and to another faculty member that the missing parcel meant that he had “lost priority on some important work.” “One of my competitors, Shannon of the Bell Telephone Company, is coming out with a paper before mine,” he fumed. Wiener wasn’t being needlessly paranoid: Shannon had, by that point, previewed his still-unpublished work at 1947 conferences at Harvard and Columbia. In April 1947, Wiener and Shannon shared the same stage, and both had the opportunity to present early versions of their thoughts. Wiener, in a moment of excessive self-regard, would write to a colleague, “The Bell people are fully accepting my thesis concerning statistics and communications engineering.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“Shannon was an engineer—a man more attuned to practicality than most—and yet he was drawn to the idea that knowledge was valuable for its own sake and that discovery was pleasurable in its own right.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“Curiosity in extremis runs the risk of becoming dilettantism, a tendency to sample everything and finish nothing.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

“Thomson’s tidal solution was something like the inverse of Bush’s lawnmower. The surveying machine would read the land’s data of hills and dips and even manhole covers and output a graph; the tide machine invented by Thomson and his brother, which they christened the harmonic analyzer, took a graph as input. The operator stood before a long, open wooden box resting on eight legs, a steel pointer and a hand crank protruding from its innards. With his right hand, he took hold of the pointer and traced a graph of water levels, months’ data on high tides and low; with his left, he steadily turned the crank that turned the oiled gears in the casket. Inside, eleven little cranks rotated at their own speeds, each isolating one of the simple functions that added up to the chaotic tide. At the end, their gauges displayed eleven little numbers—the average water level, the pull of the moon, the pull of the sun, and so on—that together filled in the equation to state the tides. All of it, in principle, could be ground out by human hands on a notepad—but, said Thomson, this was “calculation of so methodical a kind that a machine ought to be found to do it.”
― Jimmy Soni, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age