Biography of Scientists
Lives of scientists, mathematicians, inventors and engineers, and books about how particular discoveries were made. Read by people who want the science through the character who found it.
68 books
Books 68
James D. Watson · 1968 · Watson's insider account of the race to DNA's structure
Paul Israel · 1998 · By the editor of the Edison Papers; the scholarly standard.
Robert Conot · 1979 · First biography to work the Edison papers; unsparing on the finances.
Richard P. Feynman · 1988 · Feynman on the Challenger inquiry and thinking from the evidence
Neil Baldwin · 1995 · Cultural biography; strong on Edison as manufactured public figure.
Perry Mehrling · 2005 · The option-pricing theory the fund's Nobel laureates were trading on.
Leslie Berlin · 2005 · Robert Noyce, Fairchild and the founding of Intel.
Walter Isaacson · 2007 · Isaacson on Einstein's thought experiments and reasoning from principles
Jimmy Soni, Rob Goodman · 2017 · Claude Shannon and the invention of information theory
T2 Edison
Edmund Morris · 2019 · Told in reverse chronological order; divisive but widely read.
Paul Strathern · 2000 · The search for the periodic table; reasoning from the elements upward
Jill Jonnes · 2003 · The current war: Edison against Westinghouse and Tesla.
Joel N. Shurkin · 2006 · Shockley and the accidental seeding of Silicon Valley.
J. Craig Venter · 2007 · Insider account of the private race to sequence the human genome
Randall E. Stross · 2007 · Edison as the first manufactured celebrity.
Leonard DeGraaf · 2013 · By the Edison archivist; illustrated, and best on the laboratory as business.
T3 Moore's Law
Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock, Rachel Jones · 2015 · Authorised biography of Gordon Moore and his forecast.
Richard P. Feynman · 1984
Robert Kanigel · 1991
Janet Browne · 2002
Richard P. Feynman · 2005
Istvan Hargittai · 2006
Hans C. Ohanian · 2008
Lawrence M. Krauss · 2011
Nancy Forbes, Basil Mahon · 2014
M. Mitchell Waldrop
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