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As a professor, I see students fascinated by science, but petrified to take a science class. This is in part because we have dehumanized science, removed the story, edited out the human, deleted the parts that allow people to connect with it. Science does not get delivered by gods, but is created by people: smart, quirky, sometimes immoral people. As a writer, my hope is to be able to reinsert life into readers’ understanding of our greatest advances. As a reader myself, I am deeply appreciative when other authors do it too.
David Hilbert was the most important mathematician at the dawn of the 20th century. In 1900, he gave the mathematical community its homework for the next 100 years setting out the list of open problems that had to be solved by 2000. While to the rest of the mathematicians, he may have appeared as their professor, he was also the class clown. As colorful and funny as he was brilliant, you cannot but come away loving this great mathematical genius.
"It presents a sensitive portrait of a great human being. It describes accurately and intelligibly on a nontechnical level the world of mathematical ideas in which Hilbert created his masterpieces. And it illuminates the background of German social history against which the drama of Hilberts life was played. Beyond this, it is a poem in praise of mathematics." -SCIENCE
I love mathematics and truly believe that “Functions Describe the World.” I'm deeply satisfied that I've spent my professional life discovering new mathematics and explaining known mathematics to others. I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas, Austin, got my PhD from Brown University, then spent three years as a G.C. Evans Instructor at Rice University, before moving to Williams, where I've been ever since. Besides writing All the Math You Missed (But Need to Know for Graduate School), I've also written Algebraic Geometry: A Problem Solving Approach (with a number of co-authors) and Electricity and Magnetism for Mathematicians: A Guided Path from Maxwell’s Equations to Yang-Mills, and a number of research articles.
Ulam was a Polish mathematical prodigy, publishing significant mathematics by the time he was 20. He was part of the rich Polish math community centered around Stefan Banach. Unlike most, he was heading to the United States in 1939 (with his younger brother) when Germany invaded Poland. All the rest of his family were murdered by the Nazis. He on the other hand ended up in Los Alamos, providing critical help on the Manhattan Project. Later in life, he wrote this book, his autobiography. Based on his history, one could well think that it would be a book full of tragic grief. Instead, it is a pean to the joys of doing mathematics and of living a life full of mathematics, without downplaying the horrors of the mid-twentieth century.
This autobiography of mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, one of the great scientific minds of the twentieth century, tells a story rich with amazingly prophetic speculations and peppered with lively anecdotes. As a member of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1944 on, Ulam helped to precipitate some of the most dramatic changes of the postwar world. He was among the first to use and advocate computers for scientific research, originated ideas for the nuclear propulsion of space vehicles, and made fundamental contributions to many of today's most challenging mathematical projects. With his wide-ranging interests, Ulam never emphasized the importance of his…
I love mathematics and truly believe that “Functions Describe the World.” I'm deeply satisfied that I've spent my professional life discovering new mathematics and explaining known mathematics to others. I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas, Austin, got my PhD from Brown University, then spent three years as a G.C. Evans Instructor at Rice University, before moving to Williams, where I've been ever since. Besides writing All the Math You Missed (But Need to Know for Graduate School), I've also written Algebraic Geometry: A Problem Solving Approach (with a number of co-authors) and Electricity and Magnetism for Mathematicians: A Guided Path from Maxwell’s Equations to Yang-Mills, and a number of research articles.
Gamma is a number, though little understood. Even its most basic properties are still unknown. We don’t even know if it is a rational number (a ratio of integers). This wonderful book explains why anyone would care. While it does require some mathematical background, anyone who has had calculus and is willing to read the book with a notepad and pen next to them in order to check and explore the formulas on their own will come away with a true appreciation of gamma and its impact.
Among the many constants that appear in mathematics, ?, e, and i are the most familiar. Following closely behind is ?,, or gamma, a constant that arises in many mathematical areas yet maintains a profound sense of mystery. In a tantalizing blend of history and mathematics, Julian Havil takes the reader on a journey through logarithms and the harmonic series, the two defining elements of gamma, toward the first account of gamma's place in mathematics. Introduced by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), who figures prominently in this book, gamma is defined as the limit of the sum of 1…
I love mathematics and truly believe that “Functions Describe the World.” I'm deeply satisfied that I've spent my professional life discovering new mathematics and explaining known mathematics to others. I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas, Austin, got my PhD from Brown University, then spent three years as a G.C. Evans Instructor at Rice University, before moving to Williams, where I've been ever since. Besides writing All the Math You Missed (But Need to Know for Graduate School), I've also written Algebraic Geometry: A Problem Solving Approach (with a number of co-authors) and Electricity and Magnetism for Mathematicians: A Guided Path from Maxwell’s Equations to Yang-Mills, and a number of research articles.
This is the bestselling textbook of all time. Euclid’s Elements has been the model for correct thinking for thousands of years. The traditional year-long course on axiomatic reasoning about geometry was easily my favorite course in high school. In fact, I sort of assumed that I was slow in that I could not “see” the underlying axioms in other classes. I simply did not realize that the other high school subjects were not axiom-based.
The story goes that as a young prairie lawyer, Abraham Lincoln carried around with him a tattered copy of the Elements so that he could learn how to think (even though he never really had much formal education). I hope this is true. Even more so, I want to believe that he developed his profound oratorial skill from the power behind Euclid.
The classic Heath translation, in a completely new layout with plenty of space and generous margins. An affordable but sturdy sewn hardcover student and teacher edition in one volume, with minimal notes and a new index/glossary.
Even before I became a romance writer, I already devoured young adult love stories like others eat sandwiches for dinner. It’s that innocent, sweet built-up to the very first kiss of the hero and heroine that would keep me reading or writing all through the night. I believe it’s a rare talent to craft the perfect tension and balance between hot and sweet. And as I’m writing my own love stories by now, I’m still on the hunt for those rare gems within the sea of novels out there.
It’s the second book of the Night World series, and Ash Redfern was my first-ever real book-crush. Heck, it lasted until today, 25 years later!!
The story is about three vampire sisters seeking refuge in a small town. Ash, their arrogant brother, arrives to bring them home but then he meets the adamant human girl, Mary-Lynnette. Until that day, he never believed in love, but it’s outstandingly beautiful to watch him fall for Mary-Lynnette and try to convince her to let him change her into a vampire, too, so they can be together forever.
I read the pages of their first kiss under the star-studded sky like 10 times before I could even continue reading the book!
Love was never so scary... The Night World is all around. It's beautiful - and deadly - and it's so easy to fall in love...
Three sisters with a secret, on the run from their cruel and ruthless brother. Can innocent Mary Lynette resiste his powerful charm - and save the sisters and herself from a deadly fate at the hands of a werewolf?
I am an applied mathematician at Oxford University, and author of the bestseller 1089 and All That, which has now been translated into 13 languages. In 1992 I discovered a strange mathematical theorem – loosely related to the Indian Rope Trick - which eventually featured on BBC television. My books and public lectures are now aimed at bringing mainstream mathematics to the general public in new and exciting ways.
I have always liked the classical geometry of triangles and circles, but Matt Parker's book helped me go way beyond that and broaden my whole outlook. And the attractively hand-drawn diagrams and zany humour just added to the whole experience. After all, how many maths authors do you know who decide to build a computer out of 10,000 dominoes, just to calculate 6 + 4?
Stand-up mathematician and star of Festival of the Spoken Nerd, Matt Parker presents Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension -- a riotous journey through the possibilities of numbers, with audience participation
- Cut pizzas in new and fairer ways! - Fit a 2p coin through an impossibly small hole! - Make a perfect regular pentagon by knotting a piece of paper! - Tie your shoes faster than ever before, saving literally seconds of your life! - Use those extra seconds to contemplate the diminishing returns of an exclamation-point at the end of every bullet-point! - Make a…
I started writing maths books because I wanted to share my love of the subject with people who had never really engaged with it at school. I soon discovered that the hardest part is getting somebody to start reading the book in the first place. Why read a book about maths unless you’re already into maths? Over the years I’ve found that the best way of engaging adults in maths is by linking it to things they are interested in – ‘the maths of everyday life,’ if you will. When you add to that a combination of stories, humour, and surprises, I’ve found it’s possible to reveal the joys of mathematics to a much wider audience.
Among my children’s bedtime stories The Number Devil was a favourite. It’s about a boy who finds his school maths lesson dull and pointless. One night in his dreams he gets visited by the Number Devil, who introduces him to the astonishing patterns to be found in numbers. By making the lead character a maths-sceptic, the author carries the reader along so that we are all drawn into the hidden beauty of mathematics. The book has wonderful colour illustrations, which adds to its charm. Parents love it too.
Twelve-year-old Robert hates his maths teacher: he sets his class boring problems and won't let them use their calculators. Then in his dreams Robert meets the Number Devil, who brings the subject magically to life, illustrating with wit and charm a world in which numbers can amaze and fascinate, where maths is nothing like the dreary, difficult process that so many of us dread. The Number Devil knows how to make maths devilishly simple.
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.
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.
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…
I’ve always adored science, and spent my teenage years searching for female role models in the sci-fi and popular science books I loved. I started out at university studying Aerospace Engineering, but upon discovering a severe allergy to lab reports, transferred to a Frankensteinian degree of my own making entitled, “Narratives of Science in Fiction and History,” which examined the interactions of science fiction and scientific history. Fascinated by nineteenth-century paleontology in particular, and wanting to learn more about women’s involvement in science during this period, I proposed as my final year project a joint creative writing/research project which would eventually become my first novel, Our Hideous Progeny.
Although this book centers a fictional scientist rather than a real one, the emotions and passion that the protagonist, Katherine, experiences feel all too real.
As a lifelong fan of mathematics, I’ve often felt that math is one of the most maligned branches of science, so I adored the way that Chung portrays Katherine’s love for the subject and the beauty of a good equation. (You can really tell that she herself has experience in the field!)
I also loved the way that Chung delved into the difficulties Katherine experiences as a woman of color in science in the decades after WWII, from outright racism and misogyny to the kind of constant, low-grade doubt and lack of support that can make being a minority in STEM so difficult.
'A young woman's battle for acceptance in a male-dominated world; her misadventures in love; and her torturous journey to track down her real parents in Germany' Mail on Sunday Best New Fiction
'What had seemed to be a Hidden Figures-style female-genius-in-a-male-world narrative turns into a thrilling back-to-my-roots mystery' Daily Telegraph
From childhood, Katherine knows she is different, and that her parents are not who they seem to be. But as she grows up and becomes a mathematician, she faces the most human of problems - who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of…
As a kid I read every popular math book I could lay my hands on. When I became a mathematician I wanted to do more than teaching and research. I wanted to tell everyone what a wonderful and vital subject math is. I started writing popular math books, and soon was up to my neck in radio, TV, news media, magazines... For 12 years I wrote the mathematical Recreations Column for Scientific American. I was only the second mathematician in 170 years to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, on TV with a live tiger. The University changed my job description: half research, half ‘outreach’. I had my dream job.
Mathematicians are constantly baffled by the public’s lack of awareness, not just of what mathematics does, but what it is. Today’s technological society functions only because of a vast range of mathematical concepts, techniques, and discoveries, which go far beyond elementary arithmetic and algebra. This was one of the first books to tackle these misunderstandings head on. It does so by examining not just the math and what it’s used for, but the social structures, the ‘conditions of civilization’ that have brought us to this curious state: utterly dependent on math, almost universally unaware that we are.
"A passionate plea against the use of formal mathematical reasoning as a method for solving mankind's problems. . . . An antidote to the Cartesian view that mathematical and scientific knowledge will suffice to solve the central problems of human existence." — The New York Times "These cogitations can and should be read by every literate person." — Science Books and Films "A warning against being seduced or intimidated by mathematics into accepting bad science, bad policies, and bad personal decisions." — Philadelphia Inquirer Rationalist philosopher and mathematician René Descartes visualized a world unified by mathematics, in which all intellectual…
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