Robert St. Amant

My roots are in San Francisco and later Baltimore, where I went to high school and college. I stayed on the move, living for a while in Texas, several years in a small town in Germany, and then several more in Massachusetts, working on a Ph.D. in computer science. I'm now a professor at North Carolina State University, in Raleigh.

Why Computing for Ordinary Mortals? I've enjoyed reading popular science books for most of my life. The best of them, whether about the physics of the universe, our biological origins, or how our minds work, gave me a new perspective on the world and our place in it. I hope you'll find something similar in my book, about the grand ideas of computer science.