A great difficulty facing a biographer of Cauchy is that of delineating the curious interplay between the man, his times, and his scientific endeavors.
This is intended as a textbook on the history, philosophy and foundations of mathematics, primarily for students specializing in mathematics, but we also wish to welcome interested students from the sciences, humanities and education.
This book describes the great pioneers of the last 2,637 years who systematically put together all the advances in the science of physics from the infinitesimally tiny to the massive universe.
In this definitive account of the quest to establish a human presence in lifeless outer space, award-winning space historian Robert Zimmerman reveals the great global gamesmanship between Soviet and American political leaders that drove the space efforts of both following the Apollo lunar landings in the 1960s and 1970s.
This book focuses on a critical reexamination of two prominent categories used in modern historiography of biology - "e;the eclipse of Darwinism"e; and the "e;modern synthesis"e;.
The epic story of how science went big and the forgotten genius who started it allentertaining, thoroughly researchedpartly a biography, partly an account of the influence of Ernest Lawrences great idea, partly a short history of nuclear physics and the Bomb (The Wall Street Journal).
A new history of the techniques, materials, and aesthetic ambitions that gave rise to the radiant verisimilitude of Jan van Eyck's oil paintings on panel.
The most thrilling, genre-busting, unlikely science book you ll ever read, from the world-renowned, multi-award-winning, superstar physicist Lisa Randal.
For centuries, scientists had only one way to study the brain: wait for misfortune to strike - strokes, seizures, infections, lobotomies, horrendous accidents, phantom limbs, Siamese twins - and see how the victims changed afterwards.
In the tradition of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief and James Gleick's Genius, The Emperor of Scent tells the story of Luca Turin, an utterly unusual, stubborn scientist, his otherworldly gift for perfume, his brilliant, quixotic theory of how we smell, and his struggle to set before the world the secret of the most enigmatic of our senses.
The story of how East Asians became "e;yellow"e; in the Western imagination-and what it reveals about the problematic history of racial thinkingIn their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white.
Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump.
The fascinating story of how the fossils of dinosaurs, mammoths, and other extinct animals influenced some of the most spectacular creatures of classical mythologyGriffins, Centaurs, Cyclopes, and Giants-these fabulous creatures of classical mythology continue to live in the modern imagination through the vivid accounts that have come down to us from the ancient Greeks and Romans.
On two days in 1761 and 1769 hundreds of astronomers pointed their telescopes towards the skies to observe a rare astronomical event: the transit of Venus across the face of the sun.
'A fabulously rich, anecdotal and gripping account of those men and women who ventured out from Britain into the swamps and jungles of the tropics in search, knowingly or not, of the missing link.
In 1858, aged thirty-five, weak with malaria, isolated in the remote Spice Islands, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to Charles Darwin: he had, he said excitedly, worked out a theory of natural selection.
Writing with characteristic bracing intelligence and clarity, Gould sheds new light on a dilemma that has plagued thinking people since the Renaissance.
In 1932, the so-called annus mirabilis of modern physics, a group of scientists gathered in Copenhagen for a week-long conference on the extraordinary new work that was taking place in laboratories across the world; work that would ultimately lead to the development of nuclear weapons and the ensuing international power struggles.
Discover this remarkable account of twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of Savannah baboons from the New York Times bestselling author of Behave.
Not Even Wrong is a fascinating exploration of our attempts to come to grips with perhaps the most intellectually demanding puzzle of all: how does the universe work at its most fundamnetal level?
