Euclid's Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.30 (960 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B002XGLCVA |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 399 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-08-11 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Lots of examples pepper the narrative to help readers achieve their own "eureka!" And it's impossible not to be staggered at the mathematical feats of these geniuses, accomplished as many of them were in the absence of anything but observation and intense thought. This question and others about space and time grew out of simple observations of the environment by a select group of thinkers whose lives and brains Mlodinow dissects. This is not just a history of geometry--it's a timeline of reason and abstraction, with all the major players present: Euclid, Descartes, Gauss, Einstein, and Witten, each represented by a minibiography. "How do you know where you are?" asks Leonard Mlodinow in his charming mathematical history, Euclid's Window. A working knowledge of basic geometry is
Finally in the fourteenth century an obscure bishop in France invented the graph and heralded the next revolution: the marriage of geometry and number. Then, while intrepid mariners were sailing back and forth across the Atlantic to the New World, a fifteen-year-old genius realized that, like the earth's surface, space could be curved. Today we are in the midst of a new revolution. Could parallel lines really meet? Could the angles of a triangle really add up to more -- or less -- than 180 degrees? The curved-space revolution reinvented both mathematics and physics; it also set the stage for a patent office clerk named Einstein to add time to the dimensions of space. But further advance was halted when the Western mind nodded off into the Dark Ages. Mlodinow reveals how geometry's first revolution began with a "little" scheme hatched by Pythagoras: the invention of a system of abstract rules that could model the universe. Through Euclid's Window L
"Don't Be Fooled - This Is More History of Modern Physics than Geometry" according to LVZee. This book purports to tell "the story of geometry from parallel lines to hyperspace." The first half starts to do exactly that. Then Mlodinow seems to get bored with geometry. Starting with the chapter on Einstein, he switches over to physics. While the history of modern physics may be interesting, it has b. "Very Good Book With An Excellent Epilogue" according to amacust. This is a very good book, much better than I expected. I thought it would be more like a college mathematics text book. Instead it is more like a novel. It is very readable and the subjects flow smoothly from one to another. I found the reading enjoyable and it kept my interest from one chapter to the next.. Great back stories Having taught University Chemistry for many years, this book was great because it gave the back story on the lives of many of the physics/chemistry theory discoverers.Favorite quote: "This question was settled for good in 1931 by the shocking theorem of Kurt GÄdel: he proved that in a system of sufficien