Technology Biography

In the mid-20th century, Michael S. Gazzaniga made one of the great discoveries in the history of neuroscience: split-brain theory, the notion that the right and left hemispheres of the brain can act independently from each other and have different strengths.

German by birth, British by naturalization, Communist by conviction, Klaus Fuchs was a fearless Nazi resister, a brilliant scientist, and an infamous spy. He was convicted of espionage by Britain in 1950 for handing over the designs of the plutonium bomb to the Russians and has gone down in history as one of the most dangerous agents in American and British history. He put an end to America's nuclear hegemony and single-handedly heated up the Cold War. But, was Klaus Fuchs really evil?

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson's revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?

Explore the stories of more than 85 of the world's most inspirational and influential scientists with this innovative and bold book of biographies. From mathematicians to meteorologists, geologists to geneticists, each scientist is presented through a combination of stimulating words. Combining elements of biography, history, and analysis, Scientists Who Changed History explains the groundbreaking contributions made by these revolutionary men and women in a clear and informative way.

A biography of the great French chemist and crystallographer, Louis Pasteur, who invented the pasteurization process, identified microbes as a cause of infectious disease, and developed the first vaccine against rabies.

As a female Jewish physicist in Berlin during the early 20th century, Lise Meitner had to fight for an education, a job, and equal treatment in her field, like having her name listed on her own research papers. Meitner made groundbreaking strides in the study of radiation, but when Hitler came to power in Germany, she suddenly had to face not only sexism, but also life-threatening anti-Semitism as well. Nevertheless, she persevered and one day made a discovery that rocked the world: the splitting of the atom.

A pioneering neuroscientist shares his story of growing up in one of Miami's toughest neighborhoods and how it led him to his groundbreaking work in drug addiction. As a youth, Carl Hart didn't realize the value of school; he studied just enough to stay on the basketball team. At the same time, he was immersed in street life. Today he is a cutting-edge neuroscientist - Columbia University's first tenured African American professor in the sciences.

The riveting story of the legendary Xerox PARC, a collection of eccentric young inventors brought together by Xerox Corporation at a facility in Palo Alto, California, during the mind-blowing intellectual ferment of the '70s and '80s.

Bill Gates, whose vision of the personal computer propelled Microsoft into one of the world's leading companies, astonished the business community in 1996 by abruptly reinventing his entire company around the Internet. He explains why the Internet has revolutionized not just Microsoft but everything else too - and at a faster pace than even he had anticipated.

In The Millionaire Next Door, best selling author Thomas Stanley identified the millionaires around you. In The Millionaire Mind, he told you how they think. Now, he tells you how to get their business.

On October 13, 1972, a Uruguayan Air Force plane carrying members of the "Old Christians" rugby team - and many of their friends and family members - crashed into the Andes Mountains. I Had to Survive offers a gripping and heartrending recollection of the harrowing, brink-of-death experience that propelled survivor Roberto Canessa to become one of the world's leading pediatric cardiologists.

The controversial Emanuel Revici, M.D., made the bones grow back in cancer patients, and restored health to AIDS patients as well as drug addicts and alcoholics. His medicines lifted debilitating migraines in as little as three minutes. Revici's reward? He was attacked and ostracized by the best. JAMA published false reports about his work. The American Cancer Society blasted him time and again. Meanwhile, word of mouth brought new patients to see him for decades.

This is the origin story of the airwaves - the foundational technology of the communications age - as told through the 40-year friendship of an entrepreneurial industrialist and a brilliant inventor. David Sarnoff, the head of RCA and equal parts Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, and William Randolph Hearst, was the greatest supporter of his friend, Edwin Armstrong, developer of the first amplifier, the modern radio transmitter, and FM radio.

To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating "treatment" that may have led to his suicide.

Гениальный ученый и загадочный изобретатель, с детства проявлявший интерес к инженерии и физике. Никола Тесла — человек, положивший начало веку открытий и пробивший путь к свету для множества интересных и порой безумных идей. Несмотря на мировую известность, его имя по сей день окутано тайной и окружено конспирологическими теориями. Но даже все это не смогло очернить его репутацию, подкрепленную более чем 300 патентами на изобретения.

More than 50 years ago, John Coltrane drew the 12 musical notes in a circle and connected them with straight lines, forming a five-pointed star. Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane had put physics and geometry at the core of his music. Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander returns the favor, using jazz to answer physics' most vexing questions about the past and future of the universe.

Clever and ambitious, Emma Jung yearned to study the natural sciences at the University of Zurich. But the strict rules of proper Swiss society at the beginning of the 20th century dictated that a woman of Emma's stature - one of the richest heiresses in Switzerland - travel to Paris to "finish" her education, to prepare for marriage to a suitable man. Engaged to the son of one of her father's wealthy business colleagues, Emma's conventional and predictable life was upended when she met Carl Jung.

As an enthusiastic participant in the Maker Movement, Mick Ebeling has found countless ways to create simple new do-it-yourself technologies. But Ebeling has always dreamed big and soon realized that by ignoring that little voice of doubt in his head, his hobby could have the potential to actually help people surmount seemingly impossible odds. From crafting prosthetics for a young Sudanese boy who lost his hands in a bombing to a machine that allowed a paralyzed artist to draw again, Ebeling soon saw that nothing is actually impossible.

For decades, Sherry Turkle has shown how we remake ourselves in the mirror of our machines. Here, she illuminates our present search for authentic connection in a time of uncharted challenges. Growing up in postwar Brooklyn, Turkle searched for clues to her identity in a house filled with mysteries. She mastered the codes that governed her mother's secretive life. She learned never to ask about her absent scientist father—and never to use his name, her name. Before empathy became a way to find connection, it was her strategy for survival.

After yet another online dating disaster, Amy Webb was about to cancel her JDate membership when an epiphany struck: It wasn’t that her standards were too high, as women are often told, but that she wasn’t evaluating the right data in suitors’ profiles. That night Webb, an award-winning journalist and digital-strategy expert, made a detailed, exhaustive list of what she did and didn’t want in a mate.