This is a review of the Princeton Companion to Mathematics. This book was forwarded to me by a friend. It is about a thousand pages long, so not a quick read, and in fact perhaps a book to be dipped into only occasionally (the book claims the original aim was to provide bedtime reading). The writing is highly accessible. Most of the material should be clear to high school graduates, some of it might require a college education. The book is divided into eight chapters. The mai

This is a review of Henri Poincare: A Scientific Biography , written by Jeremy Gray and published by Princeton University Press (592 pages). Poincare was a great mathematician and physicist. He invented the theory of automorphic functions and the field of algebraic topology, and made distinguished contributions to partial differential equations, celestial mechanics (chaos), special relativity (Lorentz and Poincare groups), number theory, and the famous conjecture in geomet

This post is a review of a biography of Marie Curie, written by her youngest daughter, Eve. Translated from the French by Vincent Shean, it won the American National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 1937, became a bestseller, and was first adapted into a movie in 1943 (later there were more films, the latest being Radioactive ) . The biography is written by someone who not only knew Marie Curie well, but was a family member. The book reads true and intimately. Issues are consid

Physics presents to us a towering intellectual edifice of knowledge and insight, an immensely deep and powerful way of looking at the world. It may not come as a surprise that human reactions to the structure, organization, nature, demands and implications of this eminent system of thought may sometimes be somewhat off-kilter. As a practitioner of physics, I find these reactions interesting and sometimes revealing of the way non-physicists regards physics. I will consider thr