|
Description
|
The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knig...
The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley Alan Turing was the mathematician whose cipher-cracking transformed the Second World War. Taken on by British Intelligence in 1938, as a shy young Cambridge don, he combined brilliant logic with a flair for engineering. In 1940 his machines were breaking the Enigma-enciphered messages of Nazi Germany’s air force. He then headed the penetration of the super-secure U-boat communications. But his vision went far beyond this achievement. Before the war he had invented the concept of the universal machine, and in 1945 he turned this into the first design for a digital computer. Turing's far-sighted plans for the digital era forged ahead into a vision for Artificial Intelligence. However, in 1952 his homosexuality rendered him a criminal and he was subjected to humiliating treatment. In 1954, aged 41, Alan Turing took his own life. Author:Andrew Hodges ISBN:9781784700089
Read more
Show less
|
“This man could plainly do for mathematics what Brian Cox has done for physics” — Sunday Times What go...
“This man could plainly do for mathematics what Brian Cox has done for physics” — Sunday Times What goes on inside the mind of a rock-star mathematician? Where does inspiration come from? With a storyteller’s gift, Cédric Villani takes us on a mesmerising journey as he wrestles with a new theorem that will win him the most coveted prize in mathematics. Along the way he encounters obstacles and setbacks, losses of faith and even brushes with madness. His story is one of courage and partnership, doubt and anxiety, elation and despair. We discover how it feels to be obsessed by a theorem during your child’s cello practise and throughout your dreams, why appreciating maths is a bit like watching an episode of Columbo, and how sometimes inspiration only comes from locking yourself away in a dark room to think. Blending science with history, biography with myth, Villani conjures up an inimitable cast of characters including the omnipresent Einstein, mad genius Kurt Godel, and Villani’s personal hero, John Nash. Birth of a Theorem combines passion and imagination to take us on a fantastical adventure through the beautiful, mysterious world of mathematics. Maths has never seemed so magical or so exciting. Author: Cedric Villani ISBN:9780099581970
Read more
Show less
|
New updated edition of the biography of a remarkable man - motor neurone disease victim and awesome intellect Stephen (A...
New updated edition of the biography of a remarkable man - motor neurone disease victim and awesome intellect Stephen (A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME) Hawking Born in 1942, Stephen Hawking is no ordinary scientist. With a career that began over thirty years ago at Cambridge University, he has managed to do more than perhaps any other physicist to broaden our basic understanding of the universe. This skilful portrait of an indefatigable genius traces the course of Hawking's life and science, marrying biography and physics to tell the story of a remarkable man. As the New Stateman said of the first edition in 1992: 'A gripping account of a physicist whose speculations could prove as revolutionary as those of Albert Einstein...Its combination of erudition, warmth, robustness, and wit is entirely appropriate to their subject. Author: Michael White & John Gribbin ISBN:9780349117287
Read more
Show less
|
Isaac Newton was born in a stone farmhouse in 1642, fatherless and unwanted by his mother. When he died in London in 172...
Isaac Newton was born in a stone farmhouse in 1642, fatherless and unwanted by his mother. When he died in London in 1727 he was so renowned he was given a state funeral—an unheard-of honor for a subject whose achievements were in the realm of the intellect. During the years he was an irascible presence at Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton imagined properties of nature and gave them names—mass, gravity, velocity—things our science now takes for granted. Inspired by Aristotle, spurred on by Galileo’s discoveries and the philosophy of Descartes, Newton grasped the intangible and dared to take its measure, a leap of the mind unparalleled in his generation. James Gleick, the author of Chaos and Genius, and one of the most acclaimed science writers of his generation, brings the reader into Newton’s reclusive life and provides startlingly clear explanations of the concepts that changed forever our perception of bodies, rest, and motion. Ideas so basic to the twenty-first century we literally take them for granted. Author: James Gleick ISBN:9780007163182
Read more
Show less
|
