Abstract
Born in 1946, I started life during the period of post-war austerity, but I remember no sense of deprivation. We were not rich, and we had ration books until 1954. Food was plain and overcooked in the traditional British style. Not an olive, not an anchovy and not a clove of garlic was ever seen in the kitchen. The house was heated only by a coal fire in the dining room, reinforced by parsimonious use of dangerous-looking electric fires. Frost on the inside of my bedroom window was common in winter.
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- 1.
The first modern differential analyser was constructed in 1931 by Vannevar Bush, also famous for predicting something very like the World Wide Web in 1945.
- 2.
O- and A-levels refer to the ordinary and advanced levels of the General Certificate of Education, the main school exams at that time.
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Squared squares were also an interest of the mathematician Bill Tutte, Turing’s colleague at Bletchley Park, who cracked Germany’s second major encryption machine, the Geheimschreiber. In 1964, Tutte visited Wyggeston in honour of Geoffrey’s work, but nobody then knew he was a war hero.
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© 2013 Springer-Verlag London
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Carpenter, B.E. (2013). Where Do Geeks Come From?. In: Network Geeks. Copernicus, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5025-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-5025-1_3
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