His persistence baffled me. He was known to guard his privacy, and I had no reason to believe he’d ever read any of my books.
His persistence baffled me. He was known to guard his privacy, and I had no reason to believe he’d ever read any of my books. Maybe someday, I continued to say. But in 2009 his wife, Laurene Powell, s...
His head-snapping insight was that gravity could be defined as the curvature of spacetime, and thus it could be represented by a metric tensor.
His embrace, however, did not extend to people who were pretentious or pompous (with the exception of Wiener). When he thought a speaker was spouting nonsense, he would stand up and ask what seemed to...
His comparisons between man-made machinery and the handiwork of nature produced in him a deep reverence for the latter. Though human ingenuity may make various inventions, he wrote, it will never devi...
He kept asking Kay and others for an assessment of trends that foretold what the future might hold for the company. During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go direct...
Grove’s mantra was Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive. Noyce and Moore may not have been paranoid, but they were never complacent.
Good telling of human stories is the best way to keep the Internet and the World Wide Web from becoming a waste vastland.
Good authors copy, great artists steal-Picassco
Gates was, after all, a serial stealer of computer time, and he had manipulated passwords to hack into accounts from eighth grade through his sophomore year at Harvard. Indeed, when he claimed in his...
Franklin would find himself more attracted to people who were practical and reliable rather than dreamy and romantic.
For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one. What I saw with Woz was somebody who wa...
Even when he was barely conscious, his strong personality came through. At one point the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was sedated. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hat...
Even though they were not fervent about their faith, Jobs’s parents wanted him to have a religious upbringing, so they took him to the Lutheran church most Sundays. That came to an end when he was thi...
Even before Jobs started elementary school, his mother had taught him how to read. This, however, led to some problems once he got to school. I was kind of bored for the first few years, so I occupied...
Einstein wrote to Bohr, using his real name, in care of Denmark’s embassy in Washington, and somehow the letter got to him. In it Einstein described his worrisome talk with Stern about the dearth of t...
Einstein was filled with good humor and sagacity, both qualities lacking in Gödel, whose intense logic sometimes overwhelmed common sense. This was on glorious display when Gödel decided to become a U...
Eddy Cue, who was in charge of the store, predicted that Apple would sell a million songs in six months. Instead the iTunes Store sold a million songs in six days.
Ed Woolard, his mentor on the Apple board, pressed Jobs for more than two years to drop the interim in front of his CEO title. Not only was Jobs refusing to commit himself, but he was baffling everyon...
During one maddening session, Kay, whose thoughts often seemed tailored to go directly from his tongue to wikiquotes, shot back a line that was to become PARC’s creed: The best way to predict the futu...