George Dyson (science historian)

George Dyson
George Dyson at The Long Now Foundation, San Francisco, 2005
Born	1953 Ithaca, New York
Nationality	American and Canadian
Occupation	science historian, writer, boat designer, builder

George Dyson (born 1953) is an author and historian of technology whose publications broadly cover the evolution of technology in relation to the physical environment and the direction of society. He has written on wide topics that include the history of computing, the development of algorithms and intelligence, communication systems, space exploration, and the design of water craft. Lecturing widely at academic institutions, corporations, and high-tech conferences, Dyson gives a historical context to the evolution of technology in modern society and provides thought-provoking ideas on the directions in which technology, such as the Internet, might develop. Dyson has been a visiting lecturer and research associate at Western Washington University's Fairhaven College and was Director’s Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2002-03. He is a frequent contributor to the Edge Foundation.

George Dyson is the son of the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson and mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson, the brother of Esther Dyson, and the grandson of the British composer Sir George Dyson. He is the father of Lauren Dyson. When he was sixteen he went to live in British Columbia to pursue his interest in kayaking and escape his father's shadow. From 1972-1975, he lived in a treehouse at a height of 30 metres that he built from salvaged materials on the shore of Burrard Inlet. Dyson became a Canadian citizen and spent 20 years in British Columbia, designing kayaks, researching historic voyages and native peoples, and exploring the Inside Passage. He is the author of Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957-1965 and Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence, in which he expanded upon the premise of Samuel Butler's 1863 article of the same name and suggested coherently that the Internet is a living, sentient being. His forthcoming book, Turing's Cathedral, is scheduled for publication in early 2012 and has been described as "a creation myth of the digital universe." He is the subject of Kenneth Brower's 1978 book The Starship and the Canoe. Dyson was the founder of Dyson, Baidarka & Company, a designer of Aleut-style skin kayaks, and he is credited with the revival of the baidarka style of kayak. He lives and works in Bellingham, Washington.

Books

• Baidarka the Kayak, 1986, Alaska Northwest Books, ISBN 088240315X
• Darwin Among the Machines, 1998, Basic Books (USA) & Allan Lane Science (UK), ISBN 0738200301
• Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship 1957-1965, 2002, Allan Lane Science, ISBN 0713992670
• Turing's Cathedral, forthcoming, Knopf/Pantheon.

External links

• Biography and articles from Edge.org
• George Dyson's Flickr Photostream
• Dyson, Baidarka & Company (Flickr Photostream by Thomas Gotchy)
• George Dyson's Mother, Verena Huber-Dyson
• A lecture by George Dyson on "von Neumann's universe"
• Engineers' Dreams
• TED Talks: George Dyson at the birth of the computer at TED
• TED Talks: George Dyson on Project Orion at TED