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PopCo
''PopCo'' is a 2004 novel by British author Scarlett Thomas. The book addresses several mathematical topics. Plot It tells a story of twenty-nine-year-old Alice Butler, a quirky, fiercely intelligent loner with an affinity for secret codes and mathematics. She works for the huge toy company named PopCo, where she creates snooping kids' kits - KidSpy, KidTec and KidCracker. At the company conference Alice and her colleagues are brought into developing the ultimate product for the teenage girls. Reception The novel has been compared to ''Cryptonomicon'' by Neal Stephenson, with similarities including a buried treasure subplot and flashbacks to Bletchley Park. A review in the journal of the American Mathematical Society praised its "subversive and lively style". A review in ''The Independent'' praised "the weight of ideas and downright chutzpah crammed into this book." Another review in ''The Independent'' described it as "a big, zeitgeisty novel that free-associates in the way ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scarlett Thomas
Scarlett Thomas (born 5 July 1972 in Hammersmith) is an English author who writes contemporary postmodern fiction. She has published ten novels, including ''The End of Mr. Y'' and ''PopCo'', as well as the ''Worldquake'' series of children's books, and ''Monkeys With Typewriters'', a book on how to unlock the power of storytelling. She is Professor of Creative Writing & Contemporary Fiction at the University of Kent. Biography Thomas is the daughter of Francesca Ashurst, and attended a variety of schools, including a state junior school in Barking, Hylands School and a boarding school for eighteen months. During her teenage years she was involved in demonstrations against the Poll Tax, nuclear weapons and the first Gulf War. She studied for her A levels at Chelmsford College and achieved a First in a degree in Cultural Studies at the University of East London from 1992 to 1995. Her first three novels feature Lily Pascale, an English literature lecturer who solves murder myste ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harper Perennial
Harper Perennial is a paperback imprint of the publishing house HarperCollins Publishers. Overview Harper Perennial has divisions located in New York, London, Toronto, and Sydney. The imprint is descended from the Perennial Library imprint founded by Harper & Row in 1964. In fall of 2005, Harper Perennial rebranded with a new logo (an Olive) and a distinct editorial direction emphasizing fiction and non-fiction from new and young authors. In the end matter, books often feature a brand-specific P.S. section that features extra material such as interviews. Recent notable books include ''I Am Not Myself These Days'' by Josh Kilmer-Purcell, ''The Yacoubian Building'' by Alaa Al Aswany, ''This Will Be My Undoing'' by Morgan Jerkins, ''The Paradox of Choice'' by Barry Schwartz, ''Lullabies for Little Criminals'' by Heather O'Neil, ''Grab On to Me Tightly as If I Knew the Way'' by Bryan Charles, and ''The Yiddish Policemen's Union'' by Michael Chabon. In November, 2011, they release ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cryptonomicon
''Cryptonomicon'' is a 1999 novel by American author Neal Stephenson, set in two different time periods. One group of characters are World War II-era Allied codebreakers and tactical-deception operatives affiliated with the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park (UK), and disillusioned Axis military and intelligence figures. The second narrative is set in the late 1990s, with characters that are (in part) descendants of those of the earlier time period, who employ cryptologic, telecom, and computer technology to build an underground data haven in the fictional Sultanate of Kinakuta. Their goal is to facilitate anonymous Internet banking using electronic money and (later) digital gold currency, with a long-term objective to distribute Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod (HEAP) media for instructing genocide-target populations on defensive warfare. Genre and subject matter ''Cryptonomicon'' is closer to the genres of historical fiction and contemporary techno-t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neal Stephenson
Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction. His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, and baroque. Stephenson's work explores mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. He also writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as ''Wired''. He has written novels with his uncle, George Jewsbury ("J. Frederick George"), under the collective pseudonym Stephen Bury. Stephenson has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (founded by Jeff Bezos) developing a spacecraft and a space launch system, and is also a cofounder of Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project ''The Mongoliad''. He was Magic Leap's Chief Futurist from 2014 to 2020. Early life Born on October 31, 1959, in Fort Meade, Maryland, Stephenson came from a family of engineers and scient ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes ( Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following 1883 for the financier and politician Sir Herbert Leon in the Victorian Gothic, Tudor, and Dutch Baroque styles, on the site of older buildings of the same name. During World War II, the estate housed the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), which regularly penetrated the secret communications of the Axis Powersmost importantly the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers. The GC&CS team of codebreakers included Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, Hugh Alexander, Bill Tutte, and Stuart Milner-Barry. The nature of the work at Bletchley remained secret until many years after the war. According to the official historian of British Intelligence, the "Ultra" intelligence produced at Bletchley shortened the war by two to four years, and without it th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Time Out (company)
Time Out Group is a global media and entertainment company. Its digital and physical presence comprises websites, mobile editions, magazines, live events and markets. Time Out covers events, entertainment and culture in cities around the world. Time Out was established in 1968, by founder Tony Elliott and has developed into a global platform across 315 cities and in 58 countries. Time Out Market was launched in 2014 in Lisbon. History The original '' Time Out'' magazine was first published in 1968 by Tony Elliott with Bob Harris as co-editor, and has since developed into a global platform across 315 cities and 58 countries. The magazine was a one-sheet pamphlet with listings for London. It started as a counter-culture publication that had an alternative viewpoint on issues such as gay rights, racial equality, and police harassment. Early issues had a print run of around 5,000 and evolved to a weekly circulation of 110,000. One of the editors in the 1970s was Roger Hutchinson. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Independent On Sunday
''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was published on Saturday 26 March 2016, leaving only the online edition. The newspaper was controlled by Tony O'Reilly's Irish Independent News & Media from 1997 until it was sold to the Russian oligarch and former KGB Officer Alexander Lebedev in 2010. In 2017, Sultan Muhammad Abuljadayel bought a 30% stake in it. The daily edition was named National Newspaper of the Year at the 2004 British Press Awards. The website and mobile app had a combined monthly reach of 19,826,000 in 2021. History 1986 to 1990 Launched in 1986, the first issue of ''The Independent'' was published on 7 October in broadsheet format.Dennis Griffiths (ed.) ''The Encyclopedia of the British Press, 1422–1992'', London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992, p. 330 It was produced b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2004 British Novels
4 (four) is a number, numeral and digit. It is the natural number following 3 and preceding 5. It is the smallest semiprime and composite number, and is considered unlucky in many East Asian cultures. In mathematics Four is the smallest composite number, its proper divisors being and . Four is the sum and product of two with itself: 2 + 2 = 4 = 2 x 2, the only number b such that a + a = b = a x a, which also makes four the smallest squared prime number p^. In Knuth's up-arrow notation, , and so forth, for any number of up arrows. By consequence, four is the only square one more than a prime number, specifically three. The sum of the first four prime numbers two + three + five + seven is the only sum of four consecutive prime numbers that yields an odd prime number, seventeen, which is the fourth super-prime. Four lies between the first proper pair of twin primes, three and five, which are the first two Fermat primes, like seventeen, which is the third. On the oth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Novels About Cryptography
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the histori ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Postmodern Novels
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or Rhetorical modes, mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by philosophical skepticism, skepticism toward the "meta-narrative, grand narratives" of modernism, opposition to epistemological, epistemic certainty or stability of meaning (semiotics), meaning, and emphasis on ideology as a means of maintaining political power. Claims to objective fact are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the instrumental conditionality, conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-reference, self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism (philosophy), pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity (philosophy), identity, hierar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
