History
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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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A History of Pi, Petr Beckmann (ISBN 978-0312381851, St Martin’s Press)
(a history of) Pi first came out in 1970 and the author was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado. Beckmann fled Czechoslovakia at the age of 14 to escape the Nazis. In the introduction Beckmann states that he could write his own personal history of pi without having to worry about…
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Blaise Logic
“I have made this letter longer than usual because I lacked the time to make it short.” ― Blaise Pascal
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Privileged Men
If today someone calls you privileged it may well be intended as an accusation or an insult. Nothing new and unfortunately seldom done with the literary flair of George Bernard Shaw who managed to ‘insult’ a couple of less privileged professions in the same go. “Greek scholars are privileged men. Few of them know Greek…
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Royal Roads
“O King, through the country, there are royal roads and roads for common citizens, but in geometry there is one road for all.” Menaechmus (4th century BC) in answer to his pupil Alexander the Great asking for a shortcut to geometry.
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Familiar Words From 1974
I started reading {a history of} π again yesterday. I read this some 12 years ago but wanted to read it again as I am going through some algebra fundamentals helping my daughter with her math exams. Almost 50 years ago, in the preface to the third edition from 1974 author Petr Beckmann wrote the…
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Mythos. The Greek myths retold, Stephen Fry (ISBN 978-1 405 934138, Penguin)
Started reading this book during the summer holidays after a tip from friends. When i was at school classical studies were out of vogue and my knowledge of Greek history and mythology is ‘somewhat poor’. So for me this book was definitely educational. In my (probably distorted) memory books about myths were always written in…
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Tot aan de Ijzer
Deze week Tot aan de Ijzer uitgelezen. Niet het boek van Max Deauville maar reeks van De Standaard uit 2014. Toen verscheen van 28 juli tot eind van het jaar een reeks die dag na dag Wereldoorlog 1 volgt van het begin van de oorlog tot aan de Ijzer op het moment dat de vlakte…
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