De propria vita

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Patricia A. Pingry

An introduction to the life of Benjamin Franklin that details his childhood, inventions, and efforts to bring freedom to our country, and highlights his life-long love of reading.

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Bruce Schechter

For over half a century, at almost any hour of the day, mathematicians the world over might answer a knock at the front door to find a short, frail man wearing thick eyeglasses and a rumpled suit, carrying a suitcase containing all his belongings in one hand and a bag full of papers in the other, who would announce, "My brain is open!" The visitor was Paul Erdos, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century and certainly the most eccentric. Having no home or job, and incapable of the most ordinary household tasks, Erdos was sustained by the generosity of colleagues and by his own belief in the beauty of mathematics. Erdos believed that the meaning of life was to prove and conjecture. He was fascinated by numbers and became one of the century's leading numbers theorists. He worked in fields of mathematics that would prove pivotal to the development of computer science, even though he had never touched a computer. He was the most prolific mathematician who ever lived, writing or collaborating on more than 1,500 papers with over 450 different collaborators. Witty, filled with the sort of mathematical puzzles that intrigued Erdos and continue to fascinate mathematicians today, My Brain Is Open is the story of this strange genius, and a journey in his footsteps through the intriguing world of mathematics, where universal truths await discovery like hidden treasures and where brilliant proofs are poetry.

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Michael Cox

You've probably heard of Leonardo da Vinci ... He is dead famous for: painting the most famous picture in the world; designing the first-ever flying machine; and being THE all-round fabulous Renaissance Man. But have you heard that Leonardo: spent ten years making a seven-metre tall horse; thought pink was the coolest colour for clothes; and loved to play practical jokes? Now you can get the inside story with Leonardo's lost notebook, flick through the pages of the Milan Messenger and discover dozens of the dazzling invetions the great man dreamed up in his amazing super-brain.

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Michael Sharratt

In this entertaining and authoritative new biography the author examines the flair and imagination, the hard-headedness and clarity, the combativeness and penetration of the person many people call the founder of modern science - Galileo Calilei. No great scientist has excelled him in making novel ideas intelligible to nonexperts. To follow his career as he exploited unforeseen opportunities to unseat established ways of understanding nature is to understand a crucial stage of what is now known as the scientific revolution. Galileo was a path-breaker for the newly invented telescope, the decoder of nature's mathematical language and a quite brilliant popularizer of science. Even his reluctant excursion into theology has at last been officially and handsomely recognized in Pope John Paul's recent and widely reported 'rehabilitation' of the Inquisition's most famous victim. (This condemnation and subsequent rehabilitation is fully discussed in the last chapter.). Galileo appears here with all his zest for living, gregariousness, impulsiveness, vulnerability, prickliness, unfairness and creativity. This book makes his lasting contributions accessible to those who are not scientists and his mistakes are not passed over. This is not a mythical story, but the biography of an innovator - one of the greatest ever known.