Stephen Budiansky

The first major biography of the logician and mathematician whose incompleteness theorems helped launch a modern scientific revolution. Nearly a hundred years after its publication, Kurt Gödel's famous proof that every mathematical system must contain propositions that are true - yet never...

Oliver Wendell Holmes twice escaped death as a young Union officer in the Civil War when musket balls missed his heart and spinal cord by a fraction of an inch. He lived ever after with unwavering moral courage, unremitting scorn for dogma, and an insatiable intellectual curiosity. Named to...

A sweeping, in-depth history of NSA, whose famous “cult of silence” has left the agency shrouded in mystery for decades The National Security Agency was born out of the legendary codebreaking programs of World War II that cracked the famed Enigma machine and other German and Japanese...

In March 1941, after a year of unbroken and devastating U-boat onslaughts, the British War Cabinet decided to try a new strategy in the foundering naval campaign. To do so, they hired an intensely private, bohemian physicist who was also an ardent socialist. Patrick Blackett was a former navy...