Claude Shannon was a tall thin playful mathematician who invented information theory. I knew about the last bit of that sentence but not the first part until I read the recent book, “A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age,” by journalist Jimmy Soni and political scientist Rob Goodman. It was a fun book with many short chapters, each involving an episode in Shannon’s life, and it handled the math very well. Also the book impressed me because the interesting events in Shannon’s life were mostly internal, not external, and that’s hard to convey.
All of that got me thinking about the more general question of scientific vs. literary biographies. There are biographies of all sorts of people, but most common are the biographies of people who had eventful lives. George Washington, P. T. Barnum, Harriet Tubman, Zygmunt Bauman: they all did a lot, and a lot happened to them. Authors and scientists, by comparison, typically spend a quiet time on this earth. I read long biographies of John Updike, Alfred Kazin, Kingsley Amis, . . . These guys didn’t do much at all except write! Ok, they had plenty of affairs, but that’s not so interesting to read about. But I read all these books with interest, because I wanted insight into the authors’ writing. Sometimes I do read a literary biography for the stories—what exactly did Eric Blair do during his five years as a police officer in Burma?—but usually I want to learn about how these authors developed their style, how they chose their subjects, how they handled success and failure, their family life, things like that. I’m just looking for different things than I’d be looking for in a biography of Napoleon, say. The main reason I read a literary biography is that I want to learn more about the person, especially if it’s someone like George V. Higgins or Veronica Geng whose writing I really admire but who isn’t so famous that I already gave a sense of how their life went.
What about biographies of scientists? This is different, for several reasons. First, biographies of scientists tend to be highly positive. Maybe the difference is that the reader of a biography of Updike, say, will already be familiar with Updike’s ways of thinking and much of his work. In contrast, readers of a biography of a scientist will typically have only a vague idea of the subject’s work: information theory? relativity? game theory? black holes? and so the purpose of the book is typically not so much to provide a perspective on the subject’s life as to explain his or her accomplishments. The result will typically have more of a celebratory tone compared to a literary biography, and we see that here with the Shannon book. Not a problem, exactly, just a different style.
While it may be generally true that biographies of scientists portray their subjects rather positively (biographies about Feynman, Curie, and Pavlov come to mind), I know of at last one not-so-positive, yet completely fascinating and absorbing biography about a scientist: The one by Roderick Buchanan about Hans-Jürgen Eysenck (2010; “Playing with fire”; OUP). Looking back now, it was both an opening salvo to the crisis in psychology and other social sciences in general and the waning of Eysenck’s star specifically. It’s still a great read!
If the Scientist is famous (or infamous) enough, there are certainly biographies that are less than flattering:
Lysenko
https://www.amazon.com/Lysenkos-Ghost-Epigenetics-Loren-Graham/dp/0674089057/ref=pd_vtp_1/139-2997636-2406608
Oppenheimer
https://www.amazon.com/American-Prometheus-Triumph-Tragedy-Oppenheimer/dp/0375726268/ref=pd_sbs_1/139-2997636-2406608?pd_rd_w=LPycZ&pf_rd_p=0f56f70f-21e6-4d11-bb4a-bcdb928a3c5a&pf_rd_r=C4TZEQ8RGH869QE25PWR&pd_rd_r=c44ed54c-c243-4250-8576-c2e6ace98c1b&pd_rd_wg=GnNF8&pd_rd_i=0375726268&psc=1
And, more recently, Hawking:
https://www.amazon.com/Hawking-Selling-Scientific-Celebrity/dp/1541618378
Not a biography admittedly but reviews of the just-released Sky documentary “Hawking: Can you hear me?” suggest that it will be worthwhile viewing.
There’s also the Hodges biography of Turing, The Enigma, which spawned the dramatized Cumberbatch movie. I found it [the book] fascinating because it carried the reader along with Turing’s mental obsessions, while still being a moving, flowing read.
This Shannon bio sounds similar.
Following thread for more recommendations on scientist biographies!
Sylvia Nasar’s biography of John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, painted a less than flattering picture of his personality and behavior prior to his descent into schizophrenia. As someone who read the book only after watching the movie, I was actually pretty shocked by how much of a jerk Nash appeared to be during his early life.
For me the trouble with this book as well as lots of books about great scientists is that it doesn’t explain their genius. Is there a Nash the undoubted genius without Nash the schizophrenic? Feynman spent a lot of effort trying to look just like a regular guy who happened to be smart in his autobiographical writings, but I wonder if he wasn’t very different from us regular folks and simply wore a mask that fooled the public and his biographers. Literary figures seem more like regular people whereas an Einstein is clearly different from you and me.
Just an article-length scientific biography from last week, but incredibly well-written and moving nonetheless, on someone whose name I only knew because it was the foundation of my latest PhD student’s dissertation:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/14/magazine/ingrid-daubechies.html
John:
Interesting. Something about the career made me think of Benoit Mandelbrot, although it sounds like Daubechies is a much nicer person. But similar in having broad interests and major contributions that are just slightly outside the mainstream.
Siobhan Robert’s bio of Donald Coxeter is also brilliant. As is Cheryl Misak’s recent bio of Frank Ramsey.
+1 to the Frank Ramsey recommendation. It definitely explains his work and has a celebratory tone as Andrew notes that most scientist biographies do. But I think one thing that might set it apart a bit is that it’s a portrait of an entire intellectual community (including Wittgenstein, Keynes, Virginia Woolf) of which Ramsey was a part. The community had interesting personalities and social mores, even though Ramsey himself was mainly interesting for just being extremely smart and good natured.
Interestingly, both of Daubechies’ Ph.D. students were people I first met when they were quite young. (One is the daughter of a colleague; the other was an undergraduate at UT, and is now on the faculty here.)
I very much enjoyed “Surely you are joking”, the (auto) biography of Richard Feynman
A lot of modern scientists likely have uninteresting lives (from a biographical perspective) of unending professional success due to the strong selection operating in modern academia. Born into upper-middle class families, attended good high schools, showed an aptitude towards their subject early in life, attended a good university, studied hard and got good grades, straight to grad school, excelled in grad school (enough to get post-docs, etc), successful post-docs, hired as faculty and so on. It’s a narrow path that doesn’t lend itself to exciting stories of risk taking, comebacks and adventures. I’m sure it’s a similar situation with professionally successful lawyers, doctors or engineers.
Mark:
Also with scientists there’s not much of a connection between life and work. John Updike led an uneventful life of professional success, but I still wanted to read his biography with the hope of getting insight into his writing. In contrast, reading about some scientist’s divorce . . . who cares, really?
At least three autobiographies penned by scientists come to mind which show some connection between their life and their work, viz. Peter Medawar’s “Memoirs of a thinking radish”, Stuart Sutherland’s “Breakdown”, and Roger Brown’s “Against my better judgment” (the latter two being psychologists, but their accounts are preferable to what one used to find in the ‘History of Psychology in Autobiography’ series.)