Category Archives: books

posts referring to books

A history of Merton College

Posted on 23/05/2013 by

The book A History of Merton College, by G. H. Martin and J. R. L. Highfield, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. I have had a copy for some time but, to my shame, have only just read it. Roger Highfield was a … Continue reading →

Posted in books, history | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Kilvington’s Sophismata

Posted on 22/05/2013 by

The last chapter of Mathematical Structures was about how to spot false proofs. Of course, I am not the first to do this. A curious chain (I may tell about this later) led me to The Sophismata of Richard Kilvington. … Continue reading →

Posted in books, history | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Abelian groups

Posted on 22/02/2013 by

This post is inspired by a very nice paper by Henrik Kragh Sørensen in the current issue of the Bulletin of the British Society for the History of Mathematics, entitled “What’s Abelian about abelian groups?” Abel worked and died long … Continue reading →

Posted in books, history, mathematics | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Creating modern probability

Posted on 19/10/2012 by

The title of this post is that of a book by John von Plato, on the history of probability theory from the start of the twentieth century to the 1930s, starting with Borel and Einstein (but with many backward looks) … Continue reading →

Posted in books, exposition | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Circles disturbed

Posted on 19/07/2012 by

My review of the book Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative has just appeared in the on-line version of the London Mathematical Society’s Newsletter, which can be found here. I do intend to return to this and say … Continue reading →

Posted in books, mathematics and ... | Tagged | Leave a comment

Galois

Posted on 25/10/2011 by

Today is Évariste Galois’ 200th birthday. The event will be celebrated with the publication of a new transcription and translation of Galois’ works (edited by Peter M. Neumann) by the European Mathematical Society. The announcement is here. The life of … Continue reading →

Posted in books, events, exposition, history | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Two lives

Posted on 22/09/2011 by

Two lives in mathematics and physics are treated in recent books: Feynman, a comic book biography by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick; and The Genius in my Basement: The Biography of a Happy Man by Alexander Masters, a book which … Continue reading →

Posted in books | Tagged , | Leave a comment

A literary-mathematical puzzle

Posted on 25/05/2011 by

In 1968, Stanislaw Lem, the great Polish science-fiction writer, published a book entitled Głos Pana. It was translated into English and published under the title His Master’s Voice in 1983. It tells the story of how a message from an … Continue reading →

Posted in books, history | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Formal Logic

Posted on 12/05/2011 by

I came across the book I want to discuss here by an odd route. In his autobiography The Thousand-Petalled Lotus, Sangharakshita relates that, shortly after his ordination as a sramanera (novice monk), he had an academic interlude at the Benares … Continue reading →

Posted in books | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Horses

Posted on 10/05/2011 by

My brother, sister and I rode horses to primary school. The experience affected us differently. My sister still believes “four legs good, two legs bad” as a means of transport, while when my brother got a dairy farm he rounded … Continue reading →

Posted in books | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment