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 that 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´.
By breaking the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things, they unleashed the powers of coded sequences, and the world would never be the same. In Turing´s Cathedral, George Dyson describes how the most constructive and the most destructive of human inventions were brought into existence at exactly the same time
Dyson´s account, both historic and prophetic, vividly re-creates the dawn of the digital universe, uncovering a wealth of new material to bring a story of extraordinary men and women and their ideas to life. From the lowliest smartphone 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.