DescriptionIn the tradition of Daniel Boorstin, the co-founder of Omni delivers an original work of history that demonstrates why modern science rests on a foundation built by ancient and medieval non-European societies. Lost Discoveries explores the…
DescriptionHow could you, a mathematician, believe that extraterrestrials were sending you messages? the visitor from Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and Olympian manner. "Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did, " came the answer. "So I took them seriously." Thus begins the true story of John Nash, the mathematical genius who was a legend by age 30, when he slipped into madness. Thanks to the selflessness of a beautiful woman and the loyalty of the mathematics community, he emerged after decades of ghostlike existence to win a Nobel Prize and world acclaim. The inspiration for a new motion picture starring Russell Crowe, Sylvia Nasar's award-winning biography is a drama about the mystery of the human mind, triumph over incredible adversity, and the healing power of love.
Description"Your world has not just four dimensions, but five, fifty, a million, or even an infinity of them!" - A. Square For more than 100 years, Edwin Abbott's mathematical adventure has charmed and fascinated. Set in a world on one plane, Flatland…
DescriptionAn engaging, pellucid explanation of the mathematical understanding of infinity, enlivened by a historical gloss on age-old affinities... - Washington Post Book World Toward the end of the 19th century, one of the most brilliant mathematicians in…
DescriptionThe Babylonians invented it, the Greeks banned it, the Hindus worshipped it, and the Church used it to ward off heretics. Zero - infinity's twin - is not like other numbers. It is both nothing and everything. For centuries the power of zero smacked of the demonic; once harnessed, it became the most important tool in mathematics. In Zero, science journalist Charles Seife follows this innocent-looking number from its birth as an Eastern philosophical concept to its struggle for acceptance in Europe, its rise and transcendence in the West, and its ever-present threat to modern physics. Here are the legendary thinkers - from Pythagoras to Newton to Heisenberg, from the Kabalists to today's astrophysicists - who have tried to understand it and whose clashes shook the foundations of philosophy, science, mathematics, and religion.
