What are some good biographies to read?
dcminter: Assuming you're looking for a slightly hacker oriented biography then I can heartily recommend "The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Inventive Life of Robert Hooke" by Stephen Inwood.It gives an interesting insight to what it might have meant to have something of the hacker mindset in the 17th Century, and his connection with some of his contemporaries (Newton, Halley, and Wren notable amongst them) add to the general interest. Plus he was a supremely odd and cranky person.