Turing's Cathedral

TURING’S CATHEDRALThe Origins of the Digital Universe

By George Dyson

Published in hardback by Allen Lane on 1 March 2012, £25

Also available as an eBook

Praise for DARWIN AMONG THE MACHINES: 'A very deep and important book, beautifully written' Oliver Sacks

'A book that can be read as literature, whether or not you have any interest in computers and machine intelligence . . . satisfying, edifying and accessible' John Gribbin

'Extraordinarily exciting, intriguing and very idiosyncratic' Nature

'Fabulous, a brilliant read' Time Out

How did computers take over the world? In late 1945, a small group of brilliant engineers and mathematicians gathered at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their ostensible goal was to build a computer which would be instrumental in the US government's race to create a hydrogen bomb. The mathematicians themselves, however, saw their project as the realization of Alan Turing's theoretical 'universal machine.'

In Turing's Cathedral, George Dyson vividly re-creates the intense experimentation, incredible mathematical insight and pure creative genius that led to the dawn of the digital universe, uncovering a wealth of new material to bring a human story of extraordinary men and women and their ideas to life. From the lowliest iPhone app to Google's sprawling metazoan codes, we now live in a world of self-replicating numbers and self-reproducing machines whose origins go back to a 5-kilobyte matrix that still holds clues as to what may lie ahead. • June 23, 2012, is the Centenary of Alan Turing’s birth in London. During his relatively brief life, Turing made a unique impact on the history of computing, computer science, artificial intelligence, developmental biology, and the mathematical theory of computability.

George Dyson is a historian and philosopher of science, and the author of Baidarka, Project Orion, and Darwin Among the Machines. As the son of the renowned theoretical physicist and mathematician, Freeman Dyson, he grew up among some of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th Century's Atomic Age.

Press contact: Thi Dinh, 020 7010 3156, thi.dinh@uk.penguingroup.com