Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Science & Technology

Ernst Zermelo (1871-1953) is regarded as the founder of axiomatic set theory and is best-known for the first formulation of the axiom of choice. However, his papers also include pioneering work in applied mathematics and mathematical physics.

This edition of his collected papers consists of two volumes. The present Volume II covers Ernst Zermelo's work on the calculus of variations, applied mathematics, and physics.

The papers are each presented in their original language together with an English translation, the versions facing each other on opposite pages. Each...

Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty traces the vital and varied roles of science through the story of three generations of the eminent Exner family, whose members included Nobel Prize-winning biologist Karl Frisch, the teachers of Freud and of physicist Erwin Schrodinger, artists of the Vienna Secession, and a leader of Vienna's women's movement. Training her critical eye on the Exners through the rise and fall of Austrian liberalism and into the rise of the Third Reich, Deborah R. Coen demonstrates the interdependence of the family's scientific and domestic lives, exploring the ways...

For years Alfred Russel Wallace was little more than an obscure adjunct to Charles Darwin s theory of evolution. Remembered only for prompting Darwin to write "On the Origin of Species "in 1859 by writing his own letter proposing a theory of natural selection, Wallace was rightly dubbed by one biographer the forgotten naturalist. In 1998 Sahotra Sarkar bemoaned Wallace s lapse into obscurity, noting that "at least in the 19th century literature, the theory of evolution was usually referred to as the Darwin and Wallace theory . In the 20th century, the theory of evolution has become...

Jon Turk has kayaked around Cape Horn, traversed the Northwest Passage and paddled across the Pacific Rim. But, the strangest trip he ever took was the journey he made as a man of science into the realm of the spiritual. In 2000, in the remote Siberian village of Vyvenka, Jon Turk met an elderly woman named Moolynaut, a Koryak shaman, and learned about her voyages to the spirit world. A year later, Moolynaut entreated the spirit of a great, black raven to help mend his pelvis, which had been previously fractured in a mountaineering accident. When the healing was complete, Turk was able to...

In this thrilling and fascinating account of Frank Bender and his work, readers will be drawn into the cases he has solved, the intricacies of his art, the colorful characters he encounters, and the personal cost of his strange obsession. Through breathtakingly realistic sculptures, Frank Bender reconstructs the faces of the missing and the dead based in part on forensic science, and in part on deep intuition, an uncanny ability to discern not only a missing face but also the personality behind it.

His...

With a New Introduction by Jaron Lanier

A Salon Best Book of the Year

In 1997, the computer was still a relatively new tool---a sleek and unforgiving machine that was beyond the grasp of most users. With intimate and unflinching detail, software engineer Ellen Ullman examines the strange ecstasy of being at the forefront of the predominantly male technological revolution, and the difficulty of translating the inherent messiness of human life into artful and efficient code. Close to the Machine is an elegant and revelatory mediation on the dawn of the digital...

Here we see Wallace as perhaps the greatest naturalist of his age--spending years in remote jungles, collecting astounding quantities of specimens, writing thoughtfully and with bemused detachment at his reception in places where no white man had ever gone. Here, too,...

These days, the idea of the cyborg is less the stuff of science fiction and more a reality, as we are all, in one way or another, constantly connected, extended, wired, and dispersed in and through technology. One wonders where the individual, the person, the human, and the body are or, alternatively, where they stop. These are the kinds of questions Helene Mialet explores in this fascinating volume, as she focuses on a man who is permanently attached to assemblages of machines, devices, and collectivities of people: Stephen Hawking.
Drawing on an extensive and in-depth series of...