All these courtesy of [amazon_link id=”014101590X” target=”_blank” ]Turing’s Cathedral[/amazon_link]:

1. the physicist Max Born was Olivia Newton John‘s grandfather – her mother Irene married Cambridge prof Brin Newton-John.

2. Dylan Thomas had a night out partying in Princeton with the Hungarian topologist Raoul Bott. (Dylan Thomas partied with countless people, to be fair, although he stood up my husband’s Swansea grandfather when supposed to attend a dinner, albeit apologizing in a [amazon_link id=”0460879995″ target=”_blank” ]beautifully written letter[/amazon_link].)

3. Mathematician Kurt Gödel was married to a Viennese cabaret singer.

4. John Von Neumann met his second wife, Klári, in a Monte Carlo casino.

5. The first professor appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study (in 1932) was Oswald Veblen, nephew of Thorstein Veblen.

[amazon_image id=”014101590X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (Penguin Press Science)[/amazon_image]

Apologies for the trivia but I’ve been enjoying them.

The in-pile of books is totteringly high at the moment and I’m dithering about what to read next, after [amazon_link id=”014101590X” target=”_blank” ]Turing’s Cathedral[/amazon_link] by George Dyson. Given the recent riffs on Luddism here and elsewhere, I think I’ll go for Emma Griffin’s [amazon_link id=”0300151802″ target=”_blank” ]Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution[/amazon_link].

[amazon_image id=”0300151802″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution[/amazon_image]