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Out of Their Minds
edited by Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere

Computer Science is a relatively young field, yet it has already thrown up new ways of looking at and solving problems encountered in other fields. Personally, I have used many of the tools now taken from granted by computer users and programmers the world over, yet I know little about the people behind those tools. This book, subtitled "The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists", looks at the lives of fifteen people whose work, research and results have affect the field and, ultimately, most of us.

The book is a mix of personal recollections (in the form of quoted interviews) and overall history where the person's work is put into perspective. Due to the nature of the field, it is not easy to summarise and present the work done by these people in a completely understandable way. But the editor have done reasonably well. You may not be able to understand all the explanations, but you'll know how they have affected the field. The book is divided into four sections, dealing with communicating with computers, developing algorithms, computer designers and Artificial Intelligence. Each section highlights a few scientists.

So as not to make this overly long, I'll just mention the names of the people interviewed in this book plus the kind of work they did. More details can, of course, be found in the book itself:

• John Backus, the inventor of Fortran as well as the 'Backus-Naur' form used to describe the grammatical rules for high-level languages.
• John McCarthy, inventor of Lisp.
• Alan C. Kay, inventor of Smalltalk and who suggested a new way of programming: object oriented programming.
• Edsger W. Dijkstra, creator of the idea of semaphores for use in controlling access to (critical) sections of computer resources and who found an algorithm to find the shortest path. One of the scientists interested in formally (mathematically) proving that an algorithm is correct.
• Michael O. Rabin, who introduced the idea of randomness to help make problems computable.
• Donald E. Knuth, author of the massive multi-volume The Art of Computer Programming and creator of the typesetting language, TeX.
• Robert E. Tarjan, inventor of the depth-first search algorithm.
• Leslie Lamport, inventor of a method for distributed computers to maintain time over a network and creator of LaTeX (a document typesetting system on top of Knuth's TeX).
• Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin, co-discoverers of NP-complete problems (problems that are inherently uncomputable).
• Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., author of The Mythical Man Month, manager of IBM's System/360 system, one of the founders of virtual reality.
• Burton J. Smith, designer of the Tera machine, one of the first multi-processor supercomputers.
• W. Daniel Hillis, creator of the Connection Machine, a massive multi-processor supercomputer.
• Edward A. Feigenbaum, creator of the first Expert Systems.
• Douglas B. Lenat, creator of Cyc, one of the first attempts to teach computers common sense.

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