Einstein's Heroes : Imagining the World Through the Language of Mathematics - Hardcover

Robyn Arianrhod

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1840466103 ISBN 13: 9781840466102

Publisher: Icon Books, 2004

Synopsis

Blending science, history and biography, Einstein's Heroes takes you on a journey of discovery about the phenomenon of mathematics - humanity's universal language and one of our most amazing accomplishments. At the book's centre are the brilliant scientists who inspired Einstein, particularly James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday and Isaac Newton. Together Maxwell and Faraday settled a centuries-old physical dispute, which Newton had left in his wake, establishing mathematics as the ultimate arbiter of physical reality. With the talent of a great storyteller, Arianrhod weaves warmly observed biographies into a passionate argument for the beauty and universality of the language of maths. Einstein's Heroes is an enthralling exploration of the special magic of science, and the lives of some of its most brilliant exemplars.

About this title

About the Author:

Robyn Arianrhod is an Australian writer, journalist and academic who has taught mathematics for over ten years to university and college students. She also works in arts-based community projects and lives in the hills outside her home in the town of Melbourne. This is her first book.

From Booklist:

Einstein respected Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, and James Clerk Maxwell more than all the rest of his scientific forebears. They discovered and formulated the physical theories that enabled his theories of relativity. They communicated directly to Einstein, for despite being Anglophone while he was Germanophone, they shared the language of mathematics (though the largely self-taught Faraday ruefully confessed knowing only the dialect, so to speak, of geometry). That common language is Arianrhod's ground theme as she recaps the work of Einstein's heroes, and the story behind their stories is the development of mathematics into a means not just of accurate physical description of known reality but also of finding further reality. Newton "found" gravity by means of analytical geometry, Faraday "found" electrical fields by noting the behavior of magnetized iron filings, and Maxwell created the laws of thermodynamics by "flipping" Newton's method (from integral to differential calculus) to describe Faraday's fields. Arianrhod's achievement is to so masterfully combine history, biography, and mathematics as to absorb and enlighten even the mathematically maladroit. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1840466103
• ISBN 13: 9781840466102
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 342