by Stephen Budiansky (Author)
A Washington Post Notable Book
In March 1941, after a year of devastating U-boat attacks, the British War Cabinet turned to an intensely private, bohemian physicist named Patrick Blackett to turn the tide of the naval campaign. Though he is little remembered today, Blackett did as much as anyone to defeat Nazi Germany, by revolutionizing the Allied anti-submarine effort through the disciplined, systematic implementation of simple mathematics and probability theory. This is the story of how British and American civilian intellectuals helped change the nature of twentieth-century warfare, by convincing disbelieving military brass to trust the new field of operational research.
Author Biography
Stephen Budiansky is the author of seventeen books about military history, intelligence and espionage, science, the natural world, and other subjects. His most recent books are Code Warriors: NSA's Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union and Mad Music: Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel.
Budiansky's writing has appeared in
The Atlantic, the
New York Times magazine and op-ed pages, the
Wall Street Journal, the
Washington Post,
The Economist, and many other publications. He is a member of the editorial board of
Cryptologia, the scholarly journal of cryptology and intelligence history, and is on the
American Heritage Dictionary's Usage Panel. He lives on a small farm in Loudoun County, Virginia.
Number of Pages: 352
Dimensions: 0.7 x 7.9 x 5.1 IN
Publication Date: November 05, 2013
