George Dyson

As a child in Ithaca, New York, the science writer George Dyson—the son of a theoretical physicist and a mathematician—was an outdoors enthusiast, constructing a kayak in his bedroom at the age of twelve. He attended UC Berkeley for one semester, living mostly on a sailboat, before dropping out and moving to British Columbia, where he spent three winters in a treehouse built within a Douglas fir. His books include Darwin Among the Machines, Turing’s Cathedral, and Analogia.