Biography
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Arnold
Watched this 3 part documentary on Netflix. Each episode is roughly 1 hour long and covers a different period in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s life. Part 1 covers his youth and body building career. Part 2 is about his career as an actor and part 3 covers his venture into politics as governor of California. The series…
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Napoleon. Deel 1: van strateeg tot Keizer, Johan op de Beeck (ISBN , 9789022329115, WPG Uitgevers)
Read this biography a second time while on vacation in Austria. I had read the book a few years ago when it first came out in 2019. As the title says it is the first part of a 2 book biography, spanning a little over 1000 pages in total. Johan Op De Beeck worked many…
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A Mathematician’s Apology, G. H. Hardy (ISBN 978-938831814-3, Hawk Press)
Read this short and apparently well known book from early twentieth century. I came across a reference to it in another book recently although I don’t recall where. Anyway, the book kind of tries to justify being a pure mathematician. With the focus on pure mathematics utility is discarded as a possible justification by Hardy…
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Men of Mathematics, Eric Temple Bell (ISBN 978-0-6716-2818-5, Simon & Schuster)
A ‘classic’ from 1937. The subtitle is ‘The Lives and Achievements of the Great Mathematicians from Zeno to Poincaré’. This is not completely correct as the last chapter is dedicated to Cantor and not to Poincaré. The penultimate chapter is for Poincaré. The first chapter is as usual an introduction and Zeno is tackled in…
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Genius. The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, James Gleick (ISBN 978-0679747048, Vintage)
After having reread the collected Feynman anecdotes from Surely You’re Joking and What do you care ? in the Classic Feynman edition I wanted to reread this biography by James Gleick again. The main reason being that the anecdotes focus on stories that happened to Feynman leaving out most of the science. Originally I read…
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Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character, Richard Feynman, Ralph Leighton (ISBN 978-0393061321, W. W. Norton & Company)
This 500+ pages book contains all the stories from Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman and What do you care what other people think. If you have already read these 2 books and maybe own them then there is not much new. Unless you are a true fan. There is a foreword by Freeman Dyson and…
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What do you care what other people think, Richard Feynman (ISBN 978-0393355642, W. W. Norton & Company)
This is the follow up of the bestselling Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman. It is quite a bit thinner, only 230 pages or so and of a different nature. Where Surely You’re Joking had a lot of relatively short funny stories with Feynman playing the ‘comedian’ this book is a lot more serious in tone.…
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Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman. Adventures of a Curious Character, Richard P. Feynman (ISBN 978-0393355628, W. W. Norton)
I read this book in a Dutch translation a long time ago. And last week, looking for some light reading in the ‘scientific’ section I picked this up from the shelf. I had bought the English edition a few months back as I had given the Dutch translation to my daughter. I figured it was…
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