History
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Command And Control, Eric Schlosser (ISBN 9780141037912, Penguin)
Command and Control is written by Eric Schlosser. I read his bestseller fastfood nation long ago and liked it a lot so when this book came out in 2014 I bought it and read it. It was a scary read at the time and this year while we were on holiday this summer I decided…
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Dit kan niet waar zijn, Joris Luyendijk (ISBN 9789045034041, Atlas Contact)
Dit boek uit 2015 lag lang op de stapel te lezen boeken. Ik leerde Luyendijk ‘kennen’ door zijn column in De Standaard. En zo besloot ik zijn boek te kopen. Dat kwam dan op de stapel te liggen want ik ben een verzamelaar met meer geld dan tijd voor boeken. Een tijdje geleden had ik…
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Zero. The biography of a dangerous idea, Charles Seife (ISBN 978-0285635944, Souvenir Press Ltd)
A little book from 2000 about the history of the number zero and the linked concepts of void and infinity. It explains how Greek philosophy struggled with the void and the concept of zero and how then later on prevailing Aristotelian philosophy in the Middle Ages in Europe retarded in the introduction and use of…
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Divine numbers
God made integers, all the rest is the work of man.’― Leopold Kronecker
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The nature of man
‘What is man in nature ? Nothing in relation to the infinite, everything in relation to nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.’― Blaise Pascal
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The Abacus
The abacus has been around since ancient times and apparently is still used in some places. The abacus was once widely used and is known as soroban in Japan, suan pan in China, schoty in Russia, coulba in Turkey and choreb in Armenia for example. Maybe it would be fun to introduce them again into…
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Life Is Simple, JohnJoe McFadden (ISBN 978-1-529-36495-8, Basic Books)
I started reading this book at the end of August and only just finished it yesterday. My wife bought it at Dominicanen in Maastricht during our visit there in July and read it on vacation. She asked me to read it as well so we could exchange thoughts about it. The book is a history…
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Discovering The Expanding Universe, Harry Nussbaumer and Lydia Bieri (ISBN 978-0-521-51484-2, CUP)
This book from Cambridge University Press was first published in 2009. As the title suggests this is a history of how the expanding universe was discovered. Although all mathematics are banned to an appendix you should not expect a typical popular science book. The 187 pages spread over 18 short chapters deal with the most…
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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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