[5] In an interview with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Soni explained that part of the reason he wrote A Mind at Play was that he was drawn to Shannon's personality and wanted to read a biography about him, but "it turned out there wasn’t one.

[6] He is well known for founding digital circuit design theory in 1937, when—as a 21-year-old master's degree student at MIT—he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship.

A Mind at Play chronicles these events in Shannon's life as well as his interactions with his peers at the time including Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, Vannevar Bush, John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel, Leonard Kleinrock, Irwin M. Jacobs, Lawrence Roberts, Thomas Kailath, Steve Jobs and others.

[12] Ruby on Rails founder David Heinemeier Hansson and Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels wrote about the book on Twitter.

[13][14] Internet pioneer Vint Cerf called the book, "a boon for those eager to know more about [Shannon's] incredibly influential life — whimsical, independent and curiosity-driven.