George Dyson: Turing’s Cathedral, The Origins of the Digital Universe

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March 8, 2012

Thursday 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM

Commonwealth Club

595 Market Street (at Second) Second floor
San Francisco, California 94105

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George Dyson: Turing’s Cathedral, The Origins of the Digital Universe

George Dyson, Science Historian; Author, Turing’s Cathedral,
Baidarka and Project Orion

Want to learn where the digital universe as we know it was
born? Dyson sheds new light on the group of scientists and
their government-funded lab at the Institute for Advanced Study
in Princeton that started it all.

In the 1940s and '50s, a group of eccentric geniuses led by
John von Neumann gathered for a joint project to create the
theoretical universal machine, an idea that had been put forth
by mathematician Alan Turing. The computer that they built not
only led directly to the hydrogen bomb, but also the 20th-
century technology that came to be the digital universe we know
today.

http://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2012-03-08/george-dyson-
turings-cathedral-origins-digital-universe