The top half of the front cover from "Of Time and Stars" - a collection of Arthur C. Clarke short stories published by Puffin Books in 1974.

The Nine Billion Names of God

Sometime in the mid-1970s, my grandmother gave me a book of Arthur C. Clarke's short stories. The first story in the book, The Nine Billion Names of God, was written in 1953. It's about a computer manufacturer who is commissioned by Tibetan monks to run a program to produce all…