I first read “Cryptonomicon” by Neal Stephenson shortly after it was first published, in around 1999-2000. I re-read it recently and parts of it made much more sense \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
For anyone who is remotely interested in mathematics, computing, cryptography, World War II history and an author who doesn’t shy away from multi-page digressions about the same, “Cryptonomicon” is a must-read novel. It’s not for the faint of heart, however, given that it runs in at more than 900 pages in a reasonably small font. However, there’s plenty of interest and it’s written with a great deal of humour. If the idea of a novel which includes complex calculus, graphs and perl scripts strikes you as appealing, then this is the book for you. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
I’m deliberately including no plot details here, simply to avoid giving any spoilers for anyone who hasn’t read it before: suffice to say, however, that it weaves together plot lines from different periods of history (typically “the present”, at the time the book was written; and World War II).<\/p>\n
I really must read the follow-up novels soon, too. If you want a gentler introduction to Neal Stephenson’s work, try “Snow Crash” instead: it’s still fairly geeky, but not to the same extent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I first read “Cryptonomicon” by Neal Stephenson shortly after it was first published, in around 1999-2000. I re-read it recently and parts of it made much more sense \ud83d\ude42 For anyone who is remotely interested in mathematics, computing, cryptography, World War II history and an author who doesn’t shy away from multi-page digressions about the… (read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}