Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) was the first efficiency expert, the original time-and-motion man -- the father of scientific management, the inventor of a system that became known, inevitably enough, as Taylorism. "In the past the man has been first. In the future the System will be first," he predicted boldly, and accurately. Taylor bequeathed to us, writes Robert Kanigel in this definitive biography, a clockwork world of tasks timed to the hundredth of a minute. Taylor helped instill in us the obsession with time, order, productivity, and efficiency that marks our age. His...

Robert Kanigel takes us into the heady world of a remarkable group of scientists working at the National Institutes of Health and the Johns Hopkins University: a dynasty of American researchers who for over forty years have made Nobel Prize- and Lasker Award-winning breakthroughs in biomedical science.

-I am so proud to be Elise's student. Read this book and I suspect you will be too.---from the foreword by Robert Kanigel, author of The Man Who Knew Infinity

From the latest breakthroughs in medical research and information technologies to new discoveries about the diversity of life on earth, science is becoming both more specialized and more relevant. Consequently, the need for writers who can clarify these breakthroughs and discoveries for the general public has become acute.

In Ideas into Words, Elise Hancock, a professional writer and editor with thirty...

In 1913, a young unschooled Indian clerk wrote a letter to G H Hardy, begging the preeminent English mathematician's opinion on several ideas he had about numbers. Realizing the letter was the work of a genius, Hardy arranged for Srinivasa Ramanujan to come to England. Thus began one of the most improbable and productive collaborations ever chronicled. With a passion for rich and evocative detail, Robert Kanigel takes us from the temples and slums of Madras to the courts and chapels of Cambridge University, where the...

"On an Irish Island "tells the remarkable story of a remote outpost nearly untouched by time in the first half of the twentieth century, and of the adventurous men and women who visited and were inspired by it.
In a love letter to a vanished way of life, Robert Kanigel brings to life this wildly beautiful island, notable for the vivid communal life of its residents and the unadulterated Irish they spoke well into the twentieth century. With the Irish language rapidly disappearing, Great Blasket became a magnet for scholars, linguists, and writers during the Gaelic renaissance. As we...