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Author: Tom Petsinis
Publisher: Berkley Trade
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 442
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRich in historical detail and bursting with intellectual passion, this captivating novel describes a genius's valiant quest for truth in post-Napoleon France, a turbulent and uncertain era that in many ways mirrors the world today.
Author: Cédric Villani
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Published: 2015-04-14
Total Pages: 260
ISBN-13: 0374710236
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 2010, French mathematician Cédric Villani received the Fields Medal, the most coveted prize in mathematics, in recognition of a proof which he devised with his close collaborator Clément Mouhot to explain one of the most surprising theories in classical physics. Birth of aTheorem is Villani's own account of the years leading up to the award. It invites readers inside the mind of a great mathematician as he wrestles with the most important work of his career. But you don't have to understand nonlinear Landau damping to love Birth of aTheorem. It doesn't simplify or overexplain; rather, it invites readers into collaboration. Villani's diaries, emails, and musings enmesh you in the process of discovery. You join him in unproductive lulls and late-night breakthroughs. You're privy to the dining-hall conversations at the world's greatest research institutions. Villani shares his favorite songs, his love of manga, and the imaginative stories he tells his children. In mathematics, as in any creative work, it is the thinker's whole life that propels discovery—and with Birth of aTheorem, Cédric Villani welcomes you into his.
Author: Michal Krizek
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2013-03-14
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13: 0387218505
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe pioneering work of Pierre de Fermat has attracted the attention of mathematicians for over 350 years. This book provides an overview of the many properties of Fermat numbers and demonstrates their applications in areas such as number theory, probability theory, geometry, and signal processing. It is an ideal introduction to the basic mathematical ideas and algebraic methods connected with the Fermat numbers.
Author: Loren Graham
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2009-03-31
Total Pages: 252
ISBN-13: 0674032934
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 1913, Russian imperial marines stormed an Orthodox monastery at Mt. Athos, Greece, to haul off monks engaged in a dangerously heretical practice known as Name Worshipping. Exiled to remote Russian outposts, the monks and their mystical movement went underground. Ultimately, they came across Russian intellectuals who embraced Name Worshipping—and who would achieve one of the biggest mathematical breakthroughs of the twentieth century, going beyond recent French achievements. Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor take us on an exciting mathematical mystery tour as they unravel a bizarre tale of political struggles, psychological crises, sexual complexities, and ethical dilemmas. At the core of this book is the contest between French and Russian mathematicians who sought new answers to one of the oldest puzzles in math: the nature of infinity. The French school chased rationalist solutions. The Russian mathematicians, notably Dmitri Egorov and Nikolai Luzin—who founded the famous Moscow School of Mathematics—were inspired by mystical insights attained during Name Worshipping. Their religious practice appears to have opened to them visions into the infinite—and led to the founding of descriptive set theory. The men and women of the leading French and Russian mathematical schools are central characters in this absorbing tale that could not be told until now. Naming Infinity is a poignant human interest story that raises provocative questions about science and religion, intuition and creativity.
Author: Charles River Charles River Editors
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2018-11-20
Total Pages: 86
ISBN-13: 9781729791363
DOWNLOAD EBOOK*Includes pictures *Includes contemporary accounts *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading "People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive." - Blaise Pascal Blaise Pascal's time on earth may have been brief - no more than 39 years - but this unconventionally educated, yet brilliant scientist, mathematician, and man of letters accomplished more than most people could hope to achieve in two lifetimes. The SI unit of pressure, Pascal, is named after this polymath, and he is the namesake of a procedural programming language designed by Niklaus Wirth between the years of 1968 and 1969. On top of the countless busts, statues, and plaques erected in his honor, several institutions bear his name, as does a university in his hometown of Clermont-Ferrand. The Blaise Pascal Chairs, a glittering accolade awarded to exceptional international scientists every year, was also established in his honor. How did Blaise Pascal leave such a legacy in such a short amount of time? Blaise Pascal: The Life and Legacy of the Legendary French Mathematician and Theologian examines the life and work that made him one of modern history's most important figures. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Pascal like never before.
Author: Joseph Mazur
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2014-03-23
Total Pages: 311
ISBN-13: 1400850118
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn entertaining look at the origins of mathematical symbols While all of us regularly use basic math symbols such as those for plus, minus, and equals, few of us know that many of these symbols weren't available before the sixteenth century. What did mathematicians rely on for their work before then? And how did mathematical notations evolve into what we know today? In Enlightening Symbols, popular math writer Joseph Mazur explains the fascinating history behind the development of our mathematical notation system. He shows how symbols were used initially, how one symbol replaced another over time, and how written math was conveyed before and after symbols became widely adopted. Traversing mathematical history and the foundations of numerals in different cultures, Mazur looks at how historians have disagreed over the origins of the numerical system for the past two centuries. He follows the transfigurations of algebra from a rhetorical style to a symbolic one, demonstrating that most algebra before the sixteenth century was written in prose or in verse employing the written names of numerals. Mazur also investigates the subconscious and psychological effects that mathematical symbols have had on mathematical thought, moods, meaning, communication, and comprehension. He considers how these symbols influence us (through similarity, association, identity, resemblance, and repeated imagery), how they lead to new ideas by subconscious associations, how they make connections between experience and the unknown, and how they contribute to the communication of basic mathematics. From words to abbreviations to symbols, this book shows how math evolved to the familiar forms we use today.
Author: Laura Toti Rigatelli
Publisher: Birkhäuser
Published: 2012-12-06
Total Pages: 161
ISBN-13: 3034891989
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEvariste Galois' short life was lived against the turbulent background of the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne of France, the 1830 revolution in Paris and the accession of Louis-Phillipe. This new and scrupulously researched biography of the founder of modern algebra sheds much light on a life led with great intensity and a death met tragically under dark circumstances. Sorting speculation from documented fact, it offers the fullest and most exacting account ever written of Galois' life and work. It took more than seventy years to fully understand the French mathematician's first mémoire (published in 1846) which formulated the famous "Galois theory" concerning the solvability of algebraic equations by radicals, from which group theory would follow. Obscurities in his other writings - mémoires and numerous fragments of extant papers - persist and his ideas challenge mathematicians to this day. Thus scholars will welcome those chapters devoted specifically to explicating all aspects of Galois' work. A comprehensive bibliography enumerates studies by and also those about the mathematician.
Author: Dora Musielak
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2020-03-23
Total Pages: 261
ISBN-13: 303038375X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis biography of the mathematician, Sophie Germain, paints a rich portrait of a brilliant and complex woman, the mathematics she developed, her associations with Gauss, Legendre, and other leading researchers, and the tumultuous times in which she lived. Sophie Germain stood right between Gauss and Legendre, and both publicly recognized her scientific efforts. Unlike her female predecessors and contemporaries, Sophie Germain was an impressive mathematician and made lasting contributions to both number theory and the theories of plate vibrations and elasticity. She was able to walk with ease across the bridge between the fields of pure mathematics and engineering physics. Though isolated and snubbed by her peers, Sophie Germain was the first woman to win the prize of mathematics from the French Academy of Sciences. She is the only woman who contributed to the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. In this unique biography, Dora Musielak has done the impossible―she has chronicled Sophie Germain’s brilliance through her life and work in mathematics, in a way that is simultaneously informative, comprehensive, and accurate.
Author: Amir D Aczel
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2009-04-29
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 0786732881
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNicolas Bourbaki, whose mathematical publications began to appear in the late 1930s and continued to be published through most of the twentieth century, was a direct product as well as a major force behind an important revolution that took place in the early decades of the twentieth century that completely changed Western culture. Pure mathematics, the area of Bourbaki's work, seems on the surface to be an abstract field of human study with no direct connection with the real world. In reality, however, it is closely intertwined with the general culture that surrounds it. Major developments in mathematics have often followed important trends in popular culture; developments in mathematics have acted as harbingers of change in the surrounding human culture. The seeds of change, the beginnings of the revolution that swept the Western world in the early decades of the twentieth century -- both in mathematics and in other areas -- were sown late in the previous century. This is the story both of Bourbaki and the world that created him in that time. It is the story of an elaborate intellectual joke -- because Bourbaki, one of the foremost mathematicians of his day -- never existed.
Author: Jesper Lützen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2012-12-06
Total Pages: 893
ISBN-13: 1461209897
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis scientific biography of the mathematician Joseph Liouville is divided into two parts. The first part is a chronological account of Liouville's career including a description of the institutions he worked in, his relations with his teachers, colleagues and students, and the historical context of his works. It portrays the French scientific community in a period when Germany and England had surpassed France as the leading nations in mathematics and physics. The second part of the book gives a detailed analysis of Liouville's major contributions to mathematics and mechanics. The gradual development of Liouville's ideas, as reflected in his publications and notebooks, are related to the works of his predecessors and his contemporaries as well as to later developments in the field. On the basis of Liouville's unpublished notes the book reconstructs Liouville's hitherto unknown theories of stability of rotating masses of fluid, potential theory, Galois theory and electrodynamics. It also incorporates valuable added information from Liouville's notes regarding his works on differentiation of arbitrary order, integration in finite terms, Sturm-Liouville theory, transcendental numbers, doubly periodic functions, geometry and mechanics.
