Plato and the nerd: the creative partnership of humans and technology.

摘要

The preface to this book states that it is the author's "attempt to explain why the process of creating technology, a process that we call engineering, is a deeply creative process, and how this explains why it has become so hot and competitive, making geeks out of the brightest young minds." This is a large task, and we might expect to find a discussion based on examples from a large range of fields. But the material in the book is largely related to informatics, starting with some basic physics, then shifting to the design of circuits to support computation, and moving on to various advanced topics in computability theory. The breadth of the material demonstrates the breadth of the author's interests, and the book covers a lot of ground, even if not quite as much as the reader might infer from the preface.