George Dyson, author of Turing’s Cathedral, the On the Same Page selection for 2013, will give the keynote lecture to kick off this fall’s program.
Dyson is an author, boatbuilder, designer, and historian of technology whose interests have included the development (and redevelopment) of the Aleut kayak (Baidarka, 1986), the evolution of digital computing and telecommunications (Darwin Among the Machines, 1997), and a path not taken into space (Project Orion, 2002). His latest book, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (2012), illuminates the transition from numbers that mean things to numbers that do things in the aftermath of World War II.