George Dyson, a historian and a designer of kayaks, is a widely-acclaimed author who has focused on the history of science and technology. For more than a decade he was a research associate at Fairhaven College, Western Washington University, and also served as a visiting lecturer there. In addition, he has been a director’s visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study. Mr. Dyson grew up in Princeton and left high school without graduating to build ocean-going canoes. He briefly attended the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Berkeley, before venturing up the Pacific Coast, living in a tree house ninety-five feet up in a Douglas fir between voyages that took him from southern British Columbia to the Gulf of Alaska in his elegant hand-made craft. His first book, Baidarka (1986), is an illustrated history of the Aleut kayak builders that demonstrates the author’s innovative method for building modern versions of these beautiful and high-performance boats. It has been translated into Japanese and German and featured in television documentaries. Mr. Dyson’s second book, Darwin among the Machines (1997), winner of the Washington Governor’s Writing Award, is an intellectual history that draws together work in computer science, mathematics, and biology to tell the story of the evolution of intelligent machines and artificial life. His latest book, Project Orion, which was published by Henry Holt in 2002, examines the still-classified attempt that took place between 1957 and 1965 to build a 4,000-ton nuclear bomb-propelled interplanetary spaceship. The tale of the improbable project, conceived and carried forward by a small group of scientists that included the author’s father, was translated into Arabic and Chinese and broadcast by BBC in 2003. Mr. Dyson is currently compiling the history of John von Neumann’s electronic computer project (1945-1958) at the Institute for Advanced Study and writing, for Pantheon/Vintage/Random House and Penguin (UK), a book on the project that will illuminate the origins of digital computing and bioinformatics in the aftermath of World War II. He lives in Bellingham, Washington, and hopes to return to building boats when he completes his current manuscript.