The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdós and the Search for Mathematical Truth
A biography of a mathematical genius. Paul Erdos was the most prolific pure mathematician in history and, arguably, the strangest too.
Science: general issues
Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: Why Intelligence Increases When You Think Less
‘Learning to loaf’ – this books explores the ways of knowing that require more time, the ways we have unlearned or ignore, but that are crucial to our complete mental development.
Fermat’s Last Theorem
The extraordinary story of the solving of a puzzle that has confounded mathematicians since the 17th-century. The solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem is the most important mathematical development of the last 358 years.
Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: Why Intelligence Increases When You Think Less
‘Learning to loaf’ – this books explores the ways of knowing that require more time, the ways we have unlearned or ignore, but that are crucial to our complete mental development.
Why Things Bite Back: Predicting the Problems of Progress
How scientific and technological advances solve acute problems but offer chronic problems in their stead. Tenner’s fascinating book – in the same vein as Charles Handy’s The Age of Unreason – pinpoints the problems and offers a new paradigm for controlling them.
Pythagoras’ Trousers: God, Physics and the Gender Wars
Why have men dominated science from the Ancient Greeks to the present day? In this searing work of revisionist feminist history, Margaret Wertheim finds the answer where God and physics meet.
Why Things Bite Back: New Technology and the Revenge Effect
How scientific and technological advances solve acute problems but offer chronic problems in their stead. Tenner’s fascinating book – in the same vein as Charles Handy’s The Age of Unreason – pinpoints the problems and offers a new paradigm for controlling them
Engines of Creation
‘Engines of Creation is by far the best book I have seen about the consequences of new technologies. It is ambitious and imaginative and, best of all, the thinking is technically sound.’ Marvin Minsky, Donner Professor of Science, MIT