科学史家乔治·戴森(George Dyson)早年的传奇,我在《星船、皮艇与大树》(见本刊2015年9月号)一文中略有讲述。身为大物理学家弗里曼·戴森(Freeman Dyson)之子的乔治从高中辍学,跑到树林里,在大树上住了几年,又学着造船出海。若干年后,他却突然成了一个计算机史家。最近的两本书,《达尔文的机器》和《图灵大教堂》,讲的都是二十世纪初的科学界,重点是早期计算 The early legend of George Dyson, a historian of science, was briefly described in the article “Star boat, kayak and tree” (see issue September 2015 issue). George, the son of the great physicist Freeman Dyson, dropped out of high school and went to the woods where he lived for years and learned how to make a ship. A few years later, he suddenly became a computer historian. Two recent books, Darwin’s Machine, and Turing Cathedral, cover the early twentieth century sciences, with an emphasis on early computing