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Uncle Petros is a family joke. An ageing recluse, he lives alone in a suburb of Athens, playing chess and tending to his garden. If you didn't know better, you'd surely think he was one of life's failures. But his young nephew suspects otherwise. For Uncle Petros, he discovers, was once a celebrated mathematician, brilliant and foolhardy enough to stake everything on solving a problem that had defied all attempts at proof for nearly three centuries - Goldbach's Conjecture. His quest brings him into contact with some of the century's greatest mathematicians, including the Indian prodigy Ramanujan and the young Alan Turing. But his struggle is lonely and single-minded, and by the end it has apparently destroyed his life. Until that is a final encounter with his nephew opens up to Petros, once more, the deep mysterious beauty of mathematics. Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture is an inspiring novel of intellectual adventure, proud genius, the exhilaration of pure mathematics - and the rivalry and antagonism which torment those who pursue impossible goals.
Why narrative is essential to mathematics Circles Disturbed brings together important thinkers in mathematics, history, and philosophy to explore the relationship between mathematics and narrative. The book's title recalls the last words of the great Greek mathematician Archimedes before he was slain by a Roman soldier—"Don't disturb my circles"—words that seem to refer to two radically different concerns: that of the practical person living in the concrete world of reality, and that of the theoretician lost in a world of abstraction. Stories and theorems are, in a sense, the natural languages of these two worlds—stories representing the way we act and interact, and theorems giving us ...
Parlapán was a war hero, a captain of the Greek Royal Navy, and a childhood idol in the eyes of the young Doxiadis. Years after his death, Doxiadis sets out to tell his remarkable story--and learns nearly everything he knew of Parlapán was a lie. Apostolos Doxiadis was a toddler when he first met Parlapán, his father's closest friend. Parlapán's uncommon height (at six foot three, he was practically a giant in 1950s Athens), his uniform of a captain of the Greek Royal Navy, and the constant references to him as war hero made him all but superhuman in the eyes of the young Doxiadis. Parlapán's story came to him in different versions: As a child, he heard that Parlapán was a great hero. ...
This brilliantly illustrated tale of reason, insanity, love and truth recounts the story of Bertrand Russell's life. Raised by his paternal grandparents, young Russell was never told the whereabouts of his parents. Driven by a desire for knowledge of his own history, he attempted to force the world to yield to his yearnings- for truth, clarity and resolve. As he grew older, and increasingly sophisticated as a philosopher and mathematician, Russell strove to create an objective language with which to describe the world - one free of the biases and slippages of the written word. At the same time, he began courting his first wife, teasing her with riddles and leaning on her during the darker da...
Makers of 20th-Century Modern Architecture is an indispensable reference book for the scholar, student, architect or layman interested in the architects who initiated, developed, or advanced modern architecture. The book is amply illustrated and features the most prominent and influential people in 20th-century modernist architecture including Wright, Eisenman, Mies van der Rohe and Kahn. It describes the milieu in which they practiced their art and directs readers to information on the life and creative activities of these founding architects and their disciples. The profiles of individual architects include critical analysis of their major buildings and projects. Each profile is completed by a comprehensive bibliography.
An epic, moving graphic novel set in ancient Athens about the birth and the rise of democracy - from the illustrator behind the bestselling Logicomix
The book examines the history of abortion and contraception in Modern Greece from the time of its creation in the 1830s to 1967, soon after the Pill became available. It situates the history of abortion and contraception within the historiography of the fertility decline and the question of whether the decline was due to adjustment to changing social conditions or innovation of contraceptive methods. The study reveals that all methods had been in use for other purposes before they were employed as contraceptives. For example, Greek women were employing emmenagogues well before fertility was controlled; they did so in order to ‘put themselves right’ and to enhance their fertility. When th...
This new ebook from the author of 'The Music of the Primes' combines a personal insight into the mind of a working mathematician with the story of one of the biggest adventures in mathematics: the search for symmetry.
Why is math so hard? And why, despite this difficulty, are some people so good at it? If there's some inborn capacity for mathematical thinking—which there must be, otherwise no one could do it —why can't we all do it well? Keith Devlin has answers to all these difficult questions, and in giving them shows us how mathematical ability evolved, why it's a part of language ability, and how we can make better use of this innate talent.He also offers a breathtakingly new theory of language development—that language evolved in two stages, and its main purpose was not communication—to show that the ability to think mathematically arose out of the same symbol-manipulating ability that was so crucial to the emergence of true language. Why, then, can't we do math as well as we can speak? The answer, says Devlin, is that we can and do—we just don't recognize when we're using mathematical reasoning.