The best books about the poetic side of science

Why am I passionate about this?

I spent most of my life as a professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna, faithful to my first boyish infatuation. Yet, I always had an eye for the dangerous charms of philosophy. In the end, I succumbed and wrote The Waltz of Reason, convinced that the countless interactions of mathematics and philosophy provide the greatest adventure stories of reason, the scientific sagas which will remain as the most enduring and the most romantic account of humanity’s progress.   


I wrote...

The Waltz of Reason: The Entanglement of Mathematics and Philosophy

By Karl Sigmund,

Book cover of The Waltz of Reason: The Entanglement of Mathematics and Philosophy

What is my book about?

“Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry.” That notice on the door of Plato’s academy is often read as requiring all would-be philosophers to pass a math test first. I aim to show that far from erecting a barrier, mathematics serves as a door opener to philosophical thinking. It has become an indispensable tool for dealing with concepts such as infinity, chance, or the social contract. At the same time, mathematics offers philosophers endless bafflement. 

Mathematics and philosophy have dated for ages, and my book describes in a not-too-serious vein their most memorable encounters involving many of the best minds from the Dead Thinker’s Society. The two fields seem destined to remain eternally entangled in a dizzying waltz. 

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

Karl Sigmund Why did I love this book?

Every few years, I return to this book for its sheer elegance.

Richard Holmes made his name as the foremost biographer of England’s romantic poets–Shelley, Coleridge, the lot. Eventually, he fell, like them, under the thrall of the science of their age.

The attraction between artists and scientists was mutual. Coleridge attended the public lectures on chemistry by Humphry Davy because they “improved his stocks in metaphors”; William Herschel composed two dozen symphonies before he put an eye to a telescope; and Mary Shelley wrote (a few years after electricity made frog legs twitch) a darkly prescient account of baron Frankenstein’s deeds.

Richard Holmes’ book has all the uplift and effortless grace of a balloon flight (and my favorite chapter is on ballooning, actually–it serves as a prelude to Holmes’ equally spellbinding “Falling Upwards”).   

By Richard Holmes,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Age of Wonder as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, Richard Holmes's dazzling portrait of the age of great scientific discovery is a groundbreaking achievement.

The book opens with Joseph Banks, botanist on Captain Cook's first Endeavour voyage, who stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769 fully expecting to have located Paradise. Back in Britain, the same Romantic revolution that had inspired Banks was spurring other great thinkers on to their own voyages of artistic and scientific discovery - astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical - that together made up the 'age of wonder'.

In this…


Book cover of The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

Karl Sigmund Why did I love this book?

Germans can be romantic, too, if they set about it in earnest.

Young Alexander von Humboldt didn’t do things by halves. He made his own muscles twitch rather than a dead frog’s. Initially, he used the current from a galvanic cell (which made him faint). He later took up electric eels from Venezuela, caught with the unwilling help of wild horses.

Humboldt spent a large part of his fortune on a five-year journey through Latin America, which catapulted him to fame. The rest of his money went into publishing dozens of volumes relating to his explorations and describing the Cosmos, all of it large and small. His once widely admired style makes today’s readers quickly feel exhausted.

By contrast, Alexandra Wulf’s biography is a wonderful tonic. It smoothly narrates Humboldt’s adventures and insights and deftly interweaves the story with an account of his impact on others, such as Goethe, Jefferson, Darwin, and Thoreau. Humboldt was not only the greatest scientific traveler ever (said Darwin) but the most inspired influencer of them all (says I).    

By Andrea Wulf,

Why should I read it?

12 authors picked The Invention of Nature as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

WINNER OF THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD

WINNER OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2016

'A thrilling adventure story' Bill Bryson

'Dazzling' Literary Review

'Brilliant' Sunday Express

'Extraordinary and gripping' New Scientist

'A superb biography' The Economist

'An exhilarating armchair voyage' GILES MILTON, Mail on Sunday

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is the great lost scientist - more things are named after him than anyone else. There are towns, rivers, mountain ranges, the ocean current that runs along the South American coast, there's a penguin, a giant squid - even the Mare Humboldtianum on the moon.

His colourful adventures read…


Book cover of The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World

Karl Sigmund Why did I love this book?

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, two astronomers set out from Paris, one due north towards Dunkerque, the other south towards Barcelona. Their task was to measure the length of the meridian arc between these two towns and, ultimately, to determine the precise length of the new-fangled meter, meant to serve as a unit of measurement “for all people, for all time.”

This may appear to be a humdrum task. It was anything but. At that time, royal heads fell, armies sprung from the ground, and money went into hiding. The author is as painstaking about historical detail as his protagonists were about their measurements. He left out no provincial archive and no calculation scribbled on a margin.

The outcome reads like a novel, splendidly conveying the quixotic flavor of the enterprise and the Sisyphus-like dedication of its protagonists.  

By Ken Alder,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Measure of All Things as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In June 1792, amidst the chaos of the French Revolution, two intrepid astronomers set out in opposite directions on an extraordinary journey. Starting in Paris, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre would make his way north to Dunkirk, while Pierre-François-André Méchain voyaged south to Barcelona. Their mission was to measure the world, and their findings would help define the meter as one ten-millionth of the distance between the pole and the equator—a standard that would be used “for all people, for all time.”

The Measure of All Things is the astonishing tale of one of history’s greatest scientific adventures. Yet behind the public triumph…


Book cover of Measuring the World

Karl Sigmund Why did I love this book?

This book is a novel, unabashedly. It describes the lives of our old friend Humboldt and the math genius Karl Friedrich Gauss, culminating in their 1828 encounter in Berlin.

This meeting is a well-documented fact. Not everything else is. Daniel Kehlmann takes his liberties with history. He even boasts of his leger-de-main, like Alexandre Dumas.

The overall outcome is splendidly funny and uncannily wise. The cap-stone irony is that the most implausible episodes of the book are not the ones that the author invented.    


By Daniel Kehlmann,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Measuring the World as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Measuring the World recreates the parallel but contrasting lives of two geniuses of the German Enlightenment - the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss. Towards the end of the 18th century, these two brilliant young Germans set out to measure the world.

Humboldt, a Prussian aristocrat schooled for greatness, negotiates savannah and jungle, climbs the highest mountain then known to man, counts head lice on the heads of the natives, and explores every hole in the ground.

Gauss, a man born in poverty who will be recognised as the greatest mathematician since…


Book cover of The Maniac

Karl Sigmund Why did I love this book?

Again, fiction that is based on facts–but in this novel, the facts take over and engulf the reader in an apocalyptic tornado.

The book has an obsessive quality. Most of it deals with the life of the legendary mathematician John von Neumann, known as the “father of the computer,” who switched from pure mathematics to nuclear destruction, artificial life, and various other games.

Labatut’s admirably well-researched saga explores the inhuman face of science and the demonic aspects of progress “for which there is no cure” (copyright John von Neumann). A technological maelstrom to give Edgar Allan Poe the creeps, the book shows that romantic science has come a long way since Dr. Frankenstein. 


By Benjamin Labatut,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Maniac as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From the author of When We Cease to Understand the World: a dazzling, kaleidoscopic book about the destructive chaos lurking in the history of computing and AIJohnny von Neumann was an enigma. As a young man, he stunned those around him with his monomaniacal pursuit of the unshakeable foundations of mathematics. But when his faith in this all-encompassing system crumbled, he began to put his prodigious intellect to use for those in power. As he designed unfathomable computer systems and aided the development of the atomic bomb, his work pushed increasingly into areas that were beyond human comprehension and control…


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The Oracle of Spring Garden Road

By Norrin M. Ripsman,

Book cover of The Oracle of Spring Garden Road

Norrin M. Ripsman Author Of The Oracle of Spring Garden Road

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

Too often, I find that novelists force the endings of their books in ways that aren’t true to their characters, the stories, or their settings. Often, they do so to provide the Hollywood ending that many readers crave. That always leaves me cold. I love novels whose characters are complex, human, and believable and interact with their setting and the story in ways that do not stretch credulity. This is how I try to approach my own writing and was foremost in my mind as I set out to write my own book.

Norrin's book list on novels that nail the endings

What is my book about?

The Oracle of Spring Garden Road explores the life and singular worldview of “Crazy Eddie,” a brilliant, highly-educated homeless man who panhandles in front of a downtown bank in a coastal town.

Eddie is a local enigma. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a life on the streets? A dizzying ride between past and present, the novel unravels these mysteries, just as Eddie has decided to return to society after two decades on the streets, with the help of Jane, a woman whose intelligence and integrity rival his own. Will he succeed, or is…

The Oracle of Spring Garden Road

By Norrin M. Ripsman,

What is this book about?

“Crazy Eddie” is a homeless man who inhabits two squares of pavement in front of a bank in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia. In this makeshift office, he panhandles and dispenses his peerless wisdom. Well-educated, fiercely intelligent with a passionate interest in philosophy and a profound love of nature, Eddie is an enigma for the locals. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a life on the streets? Though rumors abound, none capture the unique worldview and singular character that led him to withdraw from the perfidy and corruption of human beings. Just as Eddie has…


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