Added by: Maria | Karma: 3098.81 | Coursebooks | 17 July 2007
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Isaac Newton (Lives and Legacies Series)
This slim introduction to Newton accents the personality as it lays out the science.
Christianson presents traits in the adolescent Newton that flowered or festered when he became an adult, such as his childlike curiosity and his smoldering capacity for hatred. To be blunt, Newton was a disagreeable character. The list of Newton's feuds is long and occurred throughout his life: he fought with his mother and, when he became famous, with Robert Hooke, astronomer John Flamsteed, mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, philosopher John Locke, and who knows how many unrecorded tradesmen.
The central thesis of the book is that Jesus, while free from sin, was still subject to every form of temptation that humans face, including fear, doubt, depression, reluctance, and lust. By facing and conquering all of man's weaknesses, Kazantzakis argues in the novel's preface, Christ became the perfect model for our lives; he sacrificed not only on the cross, but throughout his life. He struggled to do God's will, without ever giving in to the temptations of the flesh.
Fury is the story of a dollmaker whose dolls run wild, of living women turned into dolls and then broken, and of a revolt on the planet's far side led by an army of living dolls. Fury is a novel of an old, deep love gone wrong, of a second, twisted passion rooted in wrongness, and of a third, passionate love that just might turn out right. Fury is a novel of furious energy, a study of the workings of fury at the heart of human lives: the personal fury that poisons human relations, the psychotic fury that fuels murderers, the social fury born of our raised and disappointed hopes, the creative fury that sets free our greatest gifts, the political fury that starts revolutions and burns whole cities down. Fury is a novel of today, an utterly contemporary portrait of life at the beginning of the third millennium, life in New York during an apparently endless time of prosperity that is paradoxically also a time of barrenness in many people's lives, and also in the world-empire that America rules, although it barely knows where it is.
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Probabilities The Little Numbers That Rule Our Lives
This book is about those little numbers that we just cannot escape. Try to remember the last day you didn’t hear at least something about probabilities, chance, odds, randomness, risk, or uncertainty. I bet it’s been a while.
In this book, I will tell you about the mathematics of such things and how it can be used to better understand the world around you.
It is not a textbook though. It does not have little colored boxes with definition or theorems, nor does it contain sections with exercises for you to solve. My main purpose is to entertain you, but it is inevitable that you will also learn a thing or two. There are even a few exercises for you, but they are so subtly presented that you might not even notice until you have actually solved them.
Great Physicists The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking
This book tells about lives in science, specifically the lives of thirty from the pantheon of physics. Some of the names are familiar (Newton, Einstein, Curie, Heisenberg, Bohr), while others may not be (Clausius, Gibbs, Meitner, Dirac, Chandrasekhar). All were, or are, extraordinary human beings, at least as fascinatingas their subjects. The short biographies in the book tell the stories of both the people and their physics.
The chapters are varied in format and length, depending on the (sometimes skimpy) biographical material available. Some chapters are equipped with short sections (entitled ”Lessons”) containing background information on topics in mathematics, physics, and chemistry for the uninformed reader.
