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NO LIMIT TO IDEAS
StarMag, March 26, 2006
WHAT books do the great minds of our time read? Do they go for big thick science books, or novels, like the rest of us?
If we go by what Dr Vinton Cerf reads, then it’s a mixture of literature as well as science books.
Fondly known as the father of the Internet, Cerf is Vice-President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google Inc and chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board, the organisation responsible for managing and coordinating the Domain Name System (DNS).
Last year, he won the Association for Computer Machinery’s 2004 Turing Award (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for the computer science industry), together with Robert Kahn, with whom he co-designed TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), the transmission protocol that is the basis of Internet communications today.
And in November, both Cerf and Kahn were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush for their contributions in creating the Internet.
In an e-mail interview with StarMag, Cerf reveals that, as a child, he used to read books by Isaac Asimov and J.R.R. Tolkien. Asimov’s The Robot series and Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were read alongside the Oz series by L. Frank Baum, Salome the Wandering Jewess: My First Two Thousand Years of Love by George S. Viereck, and One Two Three ... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science by George Gamow.
Cerf’s love for science was evident from the time he was small; his staple reading included James White’s bio-medical works of fiction, The Boy Scientist by A.F. Collins and Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif.
“I loved curling up with a good book – I preferred that to outdoor sports. I read after bedtime, with a flashlight under the covers sometimes. I catalogued my books and numbered each one in my library. They were sources of excitement, inspiration, information and escape. Not that I had a bad childhood. I just liked the boundless space of ideas and the places that books could take you – anywhere you or the author could imagine,” he says.
Among the things that influenced him to go into computer science and shaped his life are science and math books as well as Scientific American magazine, which he still subscribes to today.
“These cemented a strong belief in the scientific method, theory and hypothesis, experiment, validation or refutation, repeatable results.”
Cerf’s most prized books today include a first edition of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and a two-volume 18th century set of Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift.
He also has lots of hardcover and even more paperback science fiction. “I often re-read books – The Lord of the Rings, for instance, at least a dozen times. It’s like listening to familiar and beloved musical pieces. You know how they go and you anticipate the parts you like best, treasuring that feeling every time.”
Besides science fiction, biography and history (especially the periods from 100BC to 100AD, and the Middle Ages), Cerf also reads cosmology, “partly to learn what I don’t know, partly to enjoy thinking outside the box, partly to imagine what life might have been like in earlier times.”
One of his favourite cosmology authors is Brian Greene. “I especially like his latest, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. He is so clear and readable!”
Richard Dawkins is another favourite author, Cerf says Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution “is the best exposition on Darwinian theory available since The Origin of Species.”
Cerf likes the rich imagination of Robert A. Heinlein and Asimov, and the way Orson Scott Card gets inside his characters.
Are there any books that he thinks everyone should read?
“That’s really a tough question. Some of the classics by Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle; Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies; Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale and The Selfish Gene. Gosh, the list could get pretty long!”
There are about 30 books on his desk, which he has read in recent weeks. Having just finished two books on Google, he is currently reading The Beginner’s Guide to Winning the Nobel Prize (Peter Doherty); A Certain Justice (P.D. James); Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Malcolm Gladwell); Barry Trotter (Michael Gerber); A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson); Chaos: Making a New Science (James Gleick) and Shadow of the Giant (Orson Scott Card), among other titles.
Copyright Star Publications (M) Bhd
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