Oxford. Oxford University Press, 1998. 137 p. Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was the founder of quantum theory and the author of many of its most important subsequent developments. Heisnumbered alongside Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and Rutherford as one of the greatest physicists of all time. He was born in Bristol on 8 August 1902 and died on 20 October 1984 in Tallahassee, Florida....
Dordrecht: Springer, 2011. — 284 p. — ISBN-10: 085729928X; ISBN-13: 978-0857299284 Sofia Kovalevskaya was a brilliant and determined young Russian woman of the 19th century who wanted to become a mathematician and who succeeded, in often difficult circumstances, in becoming arguably the first woman to have a professional university career in the way we understand it today. This...
Oxford University Press, 2003. — 224 p. A widespread sympathy for a neglected figure of seventeenth-century science is being displaced by something more positive - a mixture of astonishment at the extraordinary range and diversity of his talents, esteem for the originality and acumen of his science, admiration for his administrative capability and civic integrity, and...
Reidel, 1980. — 147 p. Why should the story of a woman's role in the development of a scientific theory be written? Is it to celebrate, as some have done, the heroism of a woman's struggle in a man's world? Or is it, rather, to demonstrate that gender is irrelevant to the march of scientific ideas? This book hopes to do neither. Rather, it intends to do justice both to the...
Original edition: London, Macmillan and Co., 1882. — 700 p. Digital edition (“ digital preservation ”) of the 1882-edition by James C. Rautio, Sonnet Software, Inc., 1999, — 354 p. Biographical Outline Birth And Parentage Glenlair — Childhood — 1831-1841 Boyhood — 1841-1844 Adolescence — 1844-1847 Opening Manhood — 1847-1850 Undergraduate Life At Cambridge — 1850-1854...
2nd ed. — SIAM, 2001. — 316 p. Mathematicians and lay people alike will enjoy this fascinating book that details the life of George Green, a pioneer in the application of mathematics to physical problems. Green was a mathematical physicist who spent most of the first 40 years of his life working not as a physicist but as a miller in his father's grain mill. Green received only...
Springer, 2015. - 92 p. Mary Somerville (1780-1872), after whom Somerville College Oxford was named, was the first woman scientist to win an international reputation entirely in her own right, rather than through association with a scientific brother or father. She was active in astronomy, one of the most demanding areas of science of the day, and flourished in the unique...
World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., 2018. — 360 p. — ISBN10: 9813231629. In A Lady Mathematician, the distinguished mathematician and physicist, Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat, at the urging of her children, recounts and reflects upon various key events and people from her life - first childhood memories of France, then schooling, followed by graduate studies, and finally her...
Cambridge: Perseus Books Group, 2004. — 256 p. In the middle of the last century, Norbert Wiener-ex-child prodigy and brilliant MIT mathematician -founded the science of cybernetics, igniting the information-age explosion of computers, automation, and global telecommunications. Wiener was the first to articulate the modern notion of "feedback," and his ideas informed the work...
Greenwood Press, 1968. - 149 p. The crisis in the foundations of the exact sciences, which had begun during Poincare's lifetime, did not reach a climax till decades after his death. His analysis of the issues of his time foreshadowed the trend; but, deep as was his insight and broad as was his horizon, even he could not have foreseen the extent and ramifications of the imminent...
WIT Press, 2008, 310 p. This book gives a comprehensive picture of the activities and the creative heritage of Simon Stevin, who made outstanding contributions to various fields of science in particular, physics and mathematics and many more. Among the striking spectrum of his ingenious achievements, it is worth emphasizing that Simon Stevin is rightly considered as the father...
Birkhauser, 1981. — 193 p. This book is the biography of an influential German mathematician known for her groundbreaking contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. One of the most important women in the history of mathematics, she revolutionized the theories of rings, fields, and algebras. The book also contains the obituaries of Noether written by B. L. van...
Martinus Nijhoff, 1970. — 145 p. The renovation of the arts and sciences by the Renaissance has been especially glorious in Italy and the Netherlands. Among the outstanding scholars of that period Simon Stevin, born at Bruges and living at Leiden, is one of the most interesting. Although little is known about his life, his marked personality speaks clearly to us through his...
The Mathematical Association of America, 2004. - 2nd ed. - 537 p. This biography of Gauss, by far the most comprehensive in English, is the work of professor G. Waldo Dunnington, who devoted most of his scholarly career to studying the life of Germany's greatest mathematician. The author was inspired to pursue this project at the age of twelve when he learned from his teacher...
Springer, 2015. - 233 p. This thirteenth volume of the Poincaré Seminar Series, Henri Poincaré, 1912-2012 , is published on the occasion of the centennial of the death of Henri Poincaré in 1912. It presents a scholarly approach to Poincaré’s genius and creativity in mathematical physics and mathematics. Its five articles are also highly pedagogical, as befits their origin in...
Dorling Kindersley Publishing, 2019. — 130 p. In this kids' biography, discover the inspiring story of Katherine Johnson, famed NASA mathematician and one of the subjects of the best-selling book and movie Hidden Figures. It was an incredible accomplishment when the United States first put a person on the moon--but without the incredible behind-the-scenes work of NASA...
Springer, 2012. - 195 p. Naturally occurring phenomena in the heavens have been observed and enjoyed for at least as long as the historical record. Few have stirred the human imagination with curiosity and fear as much as aurora or as they are often called in the Nordic countries, Northern Lights. The purpose of this book is to summarize the seminal contributions to auroral...
Berlin. Springer Verlag, 2017. 193 p. My interest in the scientific work of the protagonist of this book, Ettore Majorana, was first excited by Erasmo Recami some years ago. I take the opportunity here to thank most warmly for his enduring interest, encouragement, and kind willingness to make available the entire body of material he has collected, as well as his personal...
Cambridge University Press, 1990, 2008. — 380 p. A comprehensive reevaluation of Isaac Barrow (1630-1677), one of the more prominent and intriguing of all seventeenth-century men of science. Barrow is remembered today - if at all - only as Sir Isaac Newton's mentor and patron, but he in fact made important contributions to the disciplines of optics and geometry. Moreover, he...
Oxford University Press, 2014. — 364 p. James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) had a relatively brief, but remarkable life, lived in his beloved rural home of Glenlair, and variously in Edinburgh, Aberdeen, London and Cambridge. His scholarship also ranged wide - covering all the major aspects of Victorian natural philosophy. He was one of the most important mathematical physicists of...
World Scientific, 2007. — 221 p. This fascinating book assembles human stories about physicists and mathematicians. Remarkably, these stories cluster around some general themes having to do with the interaction between scientists, and with the impact of historic events — such as the advent of fascism and communism in the twentieth century — on scientists' behavior. Briefly, but...
London. The Wisconsin Press. London, 1974. - 368 p. This work, Galileo’s last and scientifically his most important, has been translated into Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and French during the past quarter-century, and perhaps also into other languages. Earlier translations into German and English have been reissued. A compendious Italian edition has appeared, in which the Latin...
Springer, 2013. — 490 p. Lazare Carnot was the unique example in the history of science of someone who inadvertently owed the scientific recognition he eventually achieved to earlier political prominence. He and his son Sadi produced work that derived from their training as engineers and went largely unnoticed by physicists for a generation or more, even though their respective...
World Scientific, 2014. - 238 p. On July 17, 2012, the centenary of Henri Poincaré's death was commemorated; his name being associated with so many fields of knowledge that he was considered as the Last Universalist. In Pure and Applied Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy, Engineering and Philosophy, his works have had a great impact all over the world. Poincaré acquired in his...
Springer, 2013. - 176 p. Vito Volterra (1860-1940) was one of the most famous representatives of Italian science in his day. Angelo Guerragio and Giovanni Paolini analyze Volterra’s most important contributions to mathematics and their applications, as well as his outstanding organizational achievements in scientific policy. Volterra was one of the founding fathers of...
Princeton University Press, 2014. - 279 p. John Napier (1550–1617) is celebrated today as the man who invented logarithms — an enormous intellectual achievement that would soon lead to the development of their mechanical equivalent in the slide rule: the two would serve humanity as the principal means of calculation until the mid-1970s. Yet, despite Napier’s pioneering efforts,...
Montrea: lC. Roy Keys Inc., 2012. — 48 p. — ISBN: 0986492671 In 1906 Johan Ludwig Heiberg (1854-1928), a Danish philologist and historian of science, discovered a previously unknown text of Archimedes (287-212 B.C.). It was a letter addressed to Eratosthenes (285-194 B.C.), the famous Greek scholar and head librarian of the Great Library of Alexandria. In it, Archimedes...
University of Chicago Press, 1994. - 293 p. Between Copernicus and Galileo is the story of Christoph Clavius, the Jesuit astronomer and teacher whose work helped set the standards by which Galileo's famous claims appeared so radical, and whose teachings guided the intellectual and scientific agenda of the Church in the central years of the Scientific Revolution. Though...
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2009. - 220 p. Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925) was one of the great pioneers of electrical science. His ideas led to huge advances in communications and now form much of the bedrock of electrical engineering - every textbook and every college course bears his stamp. Despite having little formal education he created the mathematical...
John Wiley & Sons, 2003. - 226 p. This is the biography of James Clerk Maxwell, one of the greatest scientists of our time and yet a man relatively unknown to the wider public. Approaching science with a freshness unbound by convention or previous expectations, he produced some of the most original scientific thinking of the nineteenth century — and his discoveries went on to...
Birkhäuser/Springer, 1990. - 416 p. This book attempts to trace the interaction between mathematical genius and history that has led to the conception of a stochastic cosmos. Count Tolstoy and Wiener’s Father. New England and Wiener’s Early Training, 1901–1905. Harvard and Wiener’s University Training, 1906–1913. Bertrand Russell and Wiener’s Postdoctoral Years, 1914 — 1917....
Springer International Publishing AG 2017. — 319 p. — (Springer Biographies) — ISBN: 3319506560. This book presents the entire body of thought of Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), knowledge of which is essential if one wishes to understand and correctly interpret the age in which we live. The focus is in particular on the philosophical and sociological aspects of Wiener’s thought,...
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. - 2nd ed. - 358 p. Oliver Heaviside was a pioneer of modern electrical theory. Born into a low social class of Victorian England, Heaviside made advances in mathematics by introducing the operational calculus; in physics, where he formulated the modern-day expressions of Maxwell's Laws of electromagnetism; and in electrical engineering,...
Cambridge University Press, 2001. - 263 p. In an era when science was perceived as a male domain, Mary Somerville (1780-1872) became both the leading woman scientist of her day and an integral part of the British scientific community. Her scientific writings contributed to one of the most important cultural projects of Victorian Britain: establishing science as a distinct,...
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. — 387 p. Archimedes was the greatest scientist of antiquity and one of the greatest of all time. This book is Volume I of the first fully fledged translation of his works into English. It is also the first publication of a major ancient Greek mathematician to include a critical edition of the diagrams, and the first translation into...
Brill, 2015. - 331 p. The contributors to Making of Copernicus examine by the study of particular examples how some of the myths surrounding Copernicus came about and whether they have held their validity or have vanished altogether. Are there links between a real or postulated transformation of images of the world and the application of metaphors in science, especially the...
Birkhäuser/Springer, 2009. - 306 p. Hermann Günther Graßmann (1809-1877) was one of the most remarkable personalities in 19th-century science. A "small-town genius", he developed a groundbreaking n-dimensional algebra of space and contributed to a revolution in the understanding of mathematics. His work fascinated great mathematicians such as W. R. Hamilton, J. W. Gibbs and A....
Springer International Publishing, 2017. — 994 p. — ISBN: 978-3-319-53282-0 (eBook), 978-3-319-53281-3 (Hardcover). For the first time, all five of John Napier’s works have been brought together in English in a single volume, making them more accessible than ever before. His four mathematical works were originally published in Latin: two in his lifetime (1550–1617), one shortly...
Ashgate, 2012. - 236 p. Sir James Dewar was a major figure in British chemistry for around 40 years. He held the posts of Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at Cambridge (1875–1923) and Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution (1877–1923) and is remembered principally for his efforts to liquefy hydrogen successfully in the field that would come to be...
Birkhauser, 2001. - 403 p. Historical interest and studies of Weyl's role in the interplay between 20th-century mathematics, physics and philosophy have been increasing since the middle 1980s, triggered by different activities at the occasion of the centenary of his birth in 1985, and are far from being exhausted. The present book takes Weyl's "Raum - Zeit - Materie" (Space -...
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. — 508 p. The biography of Thomas Harriot (1560/61–1621), English natural philosopher recognized for his contributions in astronomy, mathematics, and navigational techniques. He was born in the city or county of Oxford. After graduating from St Mary Hall, Oxford, Harriot travelled to the Americas, accompanying the 1585 expedition to Roanoke island...
Cambridge University Press, 1991. - 225 p. James Clerk Maxwell's (1831-1879) contributions to twentieth-century science and technology - in particular, the displacement current and the electromagnetic theory of light - are among the most spectacular innovations in the history of physics, but the technical complexities and thematic subtleties of his work have been difficult to...
Mathematical Association of America, 1999. - 168 p. ISBN: 0883857189 Many people have heard two things about Archimedes: he was the greatest mathematician of antiquity, and he ran naked from his bath crying 'Eureka!'. However, few people are familiar with the actual accomplishments upon which his enduring reputation rests, and it is the aim of this book to shed light upon this...
Springer, 2014. - 300 p. The Finnish mathematician and astronomer Anders Johan Lexell (1740–1784) was a long-time close collaborator as well as the academic successor of Leonhard Euler at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg. Lexell was initially invited by Euler from his native town of Abo (Turku) in Finland to Saint Petersburg to assist in the mathematical...
Springer, 2016. — 102 p. — (Springer Biographies) This biography traces the life and work of Mary Fairfax Somerville, whose extraordinary mathematical talent only came to light through fortuitous circumstances. Barely taught to read and write as a child, all the science she learned and mastered was self taught. In this delightful narrative the author takes up the challenge of...
A. K. Peters, 2009. — 267 p. Leonhard Euler and the Bernoullis is a fascinating tale of the Bernoulli family and Euler's association with them. Successful merchants in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Bernoullis were driven out of Antwerp during the persecution of the Huguenots and settled first in Frankfurt, and then in Basel, where one of the most remarkable mathematical...
A.K. Peters Ltd. , 2006, 264 p. Learn about the boy who could read and add numbers when he was three years old, thwarted his teacher by finding a quick and easy way to sum the numbers 1-100, attracted the attention of a Duke with his genius, and became the man who… predicted the reappearance of a lost planet, discovered basic properties of magnetic forces, invented a surveying...
University of Chicago Press, 2002. - 408 p. Self-styled adventurer, literary wit, philosopher, and statesman of science, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) stood at the center of Enlightenment science and culture. Offering an elegant and accessible portrait of this remarkable man, Mary Terrall uses the story of Maupertuis's life, self-fashioning, and scientific works...
Birkhäuser/Springer, 2012. - 442 p. This book concerns the origins of mathematical problem solving at the internationally active Osram and Telefunken Corporations during the golden years of broadcasting and electron tube research. The woman scientist Iris Runge (1888-1966), who received an interdisciplinary education at the University of Göttingen, was long employed as the sole...
Cambridge University Press, 2006. - 267 p. Our Universe can be described mathematically by a simple model developed in 1922 at Petrograd (St. Petersburg) by Alexander Friedmann (1888-1925), who predicted, before there was any observational evidence, that the whole Universe would expand and evolve with time. He was an outstanding Soviet physicist, and this vivid biography is set...
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. — 265 p. The contribution of the Dutch craftsman and scholar Isaac Beeckman to early modern scientific thought has never been properly acknowledged. Surprisingly free from the constraints of traditional natural philosophy, he developed a view of the world in which everything, from the motion of the heavens to musical harmonies, is explained...
Springer, 2012. - 271 p. ISBN: 1461424062 This book describes the life and work of Henri Poincaré, detailing most of his unique achievements in mathematics and physics. It is divided into two parts — the first on Poincaré’s life, and the second on his contributions to the mathematical sciences. Apart from biographical details, attention is given to Poincaré’s results on...
Birkhäuser, 1995. — 334 p. Oliver Heaviside's electromagnetic investigations - from the publication of his first electrical paper in 1972 to the public recognition awarded to him by Lord Kelvin in 1889 - have consistently attracted attention over the years, and of late have become a major source for the study of the development of field theory after Maxwell. "From Obscurity to...
Penguin Books Ltd., 2007. — 177 p. — ISBN: 0140286721, 9780140286724. Albert Einstein, whose Theory of Relativity had made him the most famous scientist in the world, remarked towards the end of his career that he only went in to his office at Princeton 'just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Godel'. He and Godel had both fled Europe and the clutches of Nazism and...
Comments