We all know Stephen Wolfram as the creator of Mathematica. In this short book, he gives us his perspective on a number of people who have had an impact on computer science and, of course, on Wolfram. The size of these discussions is highly variable, from a few pages to over 50 pages. My short comments on these chapters follow.

• Feynman: Wolfram recalls interacting with Richard Feynman, who he knew at Cal Tech and as a consultant on the Connection Machine.
• Gödel: Wolfram did not know Gödel, but he sees his undecidability theorem as a guarantee of an endless frontier of surprising and useful material. (For a light discussion of Gödel, see [1].)
• Turing: A brief resume of the “founding father” of the concept of computation. (For more information, see Hodges’ biography [2] or the recent film based on it. For more drama, see Breaking the code [3].)
• von Neumann: A polymath whose range included logic, quantum mechanics, computer design, and atomic energy. For Wolfram, his most interesting idea was the self-reproducing cellular automaton.
• Boole: The author of Laws of thought. Wolfram suggests that his most lasting legacy is the “simple” idea of Boolean variables.
• Lovelace: A 50-page discussion of Lovelace and Babbage. The central ideas are not just machine design, but also design notation and the possibility of universal computation. (For an amusing take on Lovelace and Babbage, see Padua’s graphic novel [4].)
• Leibniz: Wolfram visits the Leibniz archive in Hanover, reviews some of Leibniz’s groundbreaking ideas on computation, and ponders how much Leibniz could have accomplished if he were not hampered by the technology of his time.
• Mandelbrot: The creator of “fractals.” Wolfram recommends his autobiography [5].
• Jobs: Steve Jobs stands out because of his clarity of thought and his bold moves in unexpected directions. While at NeXT, he influenced the development of Mathematica and even suggested the name.
• Minsky: For almost 50 years, he was the face of artificial intelligence (AI). What about his conception of AI was ineffective?
• Towle: An independent mathematician who used Mathematica to create geometrical objects.
• Russell and Whitehead: In their tome Principia mathematica, they sought to build all of mathematics from logic. Gödel showed that there were problems with this approach. Although logic still serves as a basis for computation, Wolfram suggests that other formal systems may prove to be more useful.
• Crandall: A lesser-known figure whose algorithms are embedded in devices you use every day. (For some of Crandall’s work, see [6].)
• Ramanujan: A 40-page description of the life and works of this singular mathematician and calculator. (For more details, see Kanigel [7] or the recent film based on this book.)
• Golomb: A man who is almost synonymous with shift registers, which because of linearity are both useful and possible to analyze. Wolfram sees his cellular automata as generalizations of shift registers, which can produce sequences that are hard to analyze.

I enjoyed reading this book. One minor complaint is that the figures--many from original manuscripts--are difficult to read. This is the quintessential “bathroom book” for nerds. Get a copy.

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