While nonmathematicians may have trouble comprehending Roberts’ mathematical achievements, they will enjoy this entertaining...
A biography of the brilliant mathematician John Horton Conway (b. 1937).
Roberts (Wind Wizard: Alan G. Davenport and the Art of Wind Engineering, 2012, etc.) met her subject when he helped vet a manuscript of her award-winning earlier work, King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry (2006). Now a distinguished professor of applied and computational mathematics at Princeton and a fellow of the Royal Society of London, Conway got his start at Cambridge, where he first achieved fame for his invention of the Game of Life in 1970. The “game” is now incorporated into computer programs that explore the possibilities of simulating human cognition and the potentialities of artificial intelligence and self-reproducing robots. Initially, participants played the game by manipulating stones on a square grid. At Conway’s instigation, a group of Cambridge friends joined him in investigating the possibility of starting with two groups of colored stones (one representing live cells and the others, dead cells). The aim was to observe how, by moving them according to a few simple rules, they might evolve into complex structures, depending on the initial configuration and the rules. The game gained popularity when Conway's friend Martin Gardner wrote about it in his Scientific American column. With the development of computer capabilities, it has proved to have important scientific applications in simulating the behavior of self-organizing systems in various fields, including population studies and artificial intelligence. The emergence of unexpected patterns provides an analogy for evolution. In the appendices, the author describes some of Conway's other contributions in applied mathematics, including the invention of new numbers that he named “surreal.” While he was becoming famous as a mathematician, Conway was cultivating an over-the-top personal style as a campus eccentric with an unconventional lecturing style. The book is enlivened by anecdotes provided by family, colleagues, and friends.
While nonmathematicians may have trouble comprehending Roberts’ mathematical achievements, they will enjoy this entertaining portrait of a charismatic genius.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62040-593-2
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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