The road that leads from the Mobius strip a common-sense-defying continuous loop with only one side and one edge, made famous by the illustrations of M.C. Escher goes to some of the strangest spots imaginable. It takes us to where the purely intellectual enters our world: where our senses, overloaded with grocery bills, the price of gas, and what to eat for lunch, are expected to absorb really bizarre ideas. And no better guide to this weird universe exists than the brilliant thinker Clifford A. Pickover, the 21st century's answer to Buckminster Fuller. From molecules and metal sculptures to...

A Beginner's Guide to Immortality is a celebration of unusual lives and creative thinkers who punched through ordinary cultural norms while becoming successful in their own niches. In his latest and greatest work, world-renowned science writer Cliff Pickover studies such colofrul characters as Truman Capote, John Cage, Stephen Wolfram, Ray Kurzweil, and Wilhelm Rontgen, and their curious ideas. Through these individuals, we can better explore life's astonishing richness and glimpse the diversity of human imagination. Part memoir and part surrealistic perspective on culture, A Beginner's Guide...

Mary Toft was a young woman with a peculiar passion and an ordinary life that was forever changed when she gave birth to something nonhuman. This incredible story can justifiably be called history's most fascinating medical mystery, a dark, true-life Alice in Wonderland tale with a streak of horror. With numerous illustrations, this is an engrossing and thoroughly unique introduction to eighteenth-century science and its metaphor for today's scientific superstitions and politics.

For countless generations people have practiced a broad range of dramatic techniques to peer into the future. Here Pickover presents an exhaustive list of fortune telling techniques, from the ominous practice of human sacrifice to reading clues on the internet. Illustrations.

From the tiny twisted biological molecules to the gargantuan curling arms of many galaxies, the physical world contains a startling repetition of spiral patterns. Today, researchers have a keen interest in identifying, measuring, and defining these patterns in scientific terms. Spirals play an important role in the growth processes of many biological forms and organisms. Also, through time, humans have imitated spiral motifs in their art forms, and invented new and unusual spirals which have no counterparts in the natural world. Therefore, one goal of this multiauthored book is to stress the...

This book will allow you to travel through time and space. To facilitate your journey, the editor has scoured the four corners of the earth in a quest for unusual people and their fascinating patterns. From Mozambique, to Asia, to many European countries, the contributors to The Pattern Book include world-famous cancer researchers, little-known artists and eclectirc computer programmers. Some of the patterns are ultramodern, while others are centuries old. Many of the patterns are drawn from the universe of mathematics. Computer recipes are scattered throughout.Although the emphasis is on...

The emphasis of this book is on the graphic representation of information-containing sequences in biology - such as DNA and amino acids - in order to help the human analyst find interesting patterns. A broad range of topics are considered. Recent proposals to sequence the entire 3-billion base sequence of the human genome, recent advances in understanding viral sequences that induce cancer, and in understanding the mechanisms by which oncogenes are activated in tumours, and recent improved gene mapping techniques (with accompanying proliferation of sequence data) should ensure that this text...

This coffee-table book will delight and inform general readers curious about ideas of chaos, fractals, and nonlinear complex systems. Developed out of ten years of interdisciplinary seminars in chaos and complex systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it features multiple ways of knowing: Robin Chapman's poems of everyday experience of change in a complex world, associated metaphorically with Julien Clinton Sprott's full-color computer art generated from billions of versions of only three simple equations for strange attractors, Julia sets, and iterated function systems; his...

This coffee-table book will delight and inform general readers curious about ideas of chaos, fractals, and nonlinear complex systems. Developed out of ten years of interdisciplinary seminars in chaos and complex systems at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it features multiple ways of knowing: Robin Chapman's poems of everyday experience of change in a complex world, associated metaphorically with Julien Clinton Sprott's full-color computer art generated from billions of versions of only three simple equations for strange attractors, Julia sets, and iterated function systems; his...