Why am I passionate about this?
As a child, I felt profoundly dissatisfied by the pat and cardboard cutout explanations that some teachers offered for life and the universe: there had to be more! I decided to go into science. The explanatory power of science is 'next level,' to use a contemporary phrase, and unless and until we explore it, we'll miss the beauty and sheer wonder of the universe. Neither should we overly specialize: science is not compartmentalized, but vastly different fields of science feed into and reinforce one another. Popular science has an essential role to play: irrespective of how arcane hard science may appear to be, its story can always be told in everyday words.
H Chris' book list on weird thrilling science universe
Why did H Chris love this book?
I loved this book because it so effectively punctures the myth that mathematics might be dull or boring while teaching much about numbers, the founding stones of all the other branches of mathematics, and ultimately of all of science itself.
At first sight, numbers can seem deceptively blandāwhat else could be as plain vanilla as 1, 2, and 3? Yet simple numbers inevitably give rise to a whole menagerie of other, increasingly exotic numbersāmost of which are soon shown to collectively behave in unforeseeable, puzzling ways (such as prime numbers do). Irrational numbers are starkly counterintuitive, and Julian Harvil does an extraordinary job of showing how and why.
1 author picked The Irrationals as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
An entertaining and enlightening history of irrational numbers, from ancient Greece to the twenty-first century
The ancient Greeks discovered them, but it wasn't until the nineteenth century that irrational numbers were properly understood and rigorously defined, and even today not all their mysteries have been revealed. In The Irrationals, the first popular and comprehensive book on the subject, Julian Havil tells the story of irrational numbers and the mathematicians who have tackled their challenges, from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Along the way, he explains why irrational numbers are surprisingly difficult to define-and why so many questions still surround them.ā¦
- Coming soon!