Author: Mario Livio
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Keywords: mathematician, god
Number of Pages: 320
Published: 2009-01-06
List price: $26.00
ISBN-10: 074329405X
ISBN-13: 9780743294058

Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner once wondered about "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in the formulation of the laws of nature. Is God a Mathematician? investigates why mathematics is as powerful as it is. From ancient times to the present, scientists and philosophers have marveled at how such a seemingly abstract discipline could so perfectly explain the natural world. More than that -- mathematics has often made predictions, for example, about subatomic particles or cosmic phenomena that were unknown at the time, but later were proven to be true. Is mathematics ultimately invented

Author: S. M. Ulam
Publisher: University of California Press
Keywords: mathematician, adventures
Number of Pages: 384
Published: 1991-07-23
List price: $26.95
ISBN-10: 0520071549
ISBN-13: 9780520071544

The autobiography of mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, one of the great scientific minds of the twentieth century, tells a story rich with amazingly prophetic speculations and peppered with lively anecdotes. As a member of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1944 on, Ulam helped to precipitate some of the most dramatic changes of the postwar world. He was among the first to use and advocate computers for scientific research, originated ideas for the nuclear propulsion of space vehicles, and made fundamental contributions to many of today’s most challenging mathematical proj

Author: P.R. Halmos
Publisher: Springer
Keywords: automathography, mathematician
Number of Pages: 444
Published: 1985-05-17
List price: $64.95
ISBN-10: 0387960783
ISBN-13: 9780387960784

Author: Philip J. Davis
Publisher: AK Peters
Keywords: mathematician, education
Number of Pages: 353
Published: 2000-08
List price: $45.00
ISBN-10: 1568811160
ISBN-13: 9781568811161

In this memoir, a renowned mathematician and winner of the American Book Award traces his career in mathematics from early lessons in horse racing and the realities of life to his adventures on the lecture circuit.

Author: Andre Weil
Publisher: Birkhäuser Basel
Keywords: mathematician, apprenticeship
Number of Pages: 197
Published: 2004-02-04
List price: $79.95
ISBN-10: 3764326506
ISBN-13: 9783764326500

"Extremely readable recollections of the author... A rare testimony of a period of the history of 20th century mathematics. Includes very interesting recollections on the author’s participation in the formation of the Bourbaki Group, tells of his meetings and conversations with leading mathematicians, reflects his views on mathematics. The book describes an extraordinary career of an exceptional man and mathematicians. Strongly recommended to specialists as well as to the general public." EMS Newsletter (1992) "This excellent book is the English edition of the author’s autobiogra

Author: Amir D. Aczel
Publisher: Basic Books
Keywords: mathematician, artist
Number of Pages: 256
Published: 2007-10-05
List price: $14.95
ISBN-10: 1568583591
ISBN-13: 9781568583594

Nicolas 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 developmen

Author: G. H. Hardy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Keywords: canto, apology, mathematician
Number of Pages: 153
Published: 1992-01-31
List price: $18.99
ISBN-10: 0521427061
ISBN-13: 9780521427067

G. H. Hardy was one of this century’s finest mathematical thinkers, renowned among his contemporaries as a ’real mathematician ... the purest of the pure’. He was also, as C. P. Snow recounts in his Foreword, ’unorthodox, eccentric, radical, ready to talk about anything’. This ’apology’, written in 1940 as his mathematical powers were declining, offers a brilliant and engaging account of mathematics as very much more than a science; when it was first published, Graham Greene hailed it alongside Henry James’s notebooks as ’the best account o