STEPHEN BUDIANSKY is the author of eighteen books, including the biographies of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, American modernist composer Charles Ives, wartime scientist Patrick Blackett, and Elizabethan spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. His history of NSA and codebreaking in the Cold War, Code Warriors, was selected by the Wall Street Journal as one of the ten best books of 2017. His most recent book is Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel.
Budiansky received his master’s degree in applied mathematics from Harvard University. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts in 2011.
A former correspondent and editor at the scientific journal Nature, he has written for The Atlantic, New York Times Magazine, and many other general-interest publications. He is currently a regular book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal.
Critics have consistently praised Budiansky for making complex subjects—from nuclear physics and cryptology to military strategy, constitutional law, modern music, and politics—accessible, understandable, and vivid to the general reader, and for weaving together the private and public lives of his biographical subjects with a clarity that reveals what has often previously been obscure.
