Book picks similar to
Oliver Heaviside: The Life, Work, and Times of an Electrical Genius of the Victorian Age by Paul J. Nahin
biography
science
biographies
biografije
Jung: A Biography
Deirdre Bair - 2003
This authoritative biography reveals the untold truth about Jung's secret work for the Allies during World War II, his controversial affair with one of his patients, and the contents of his private papers, as well as never before published photos.
What's it all About?
Cilla Black - 2003
Generations have grown up with Cilla's music, TV shows, and performances. But how much do we really know about 'the girl with the bright red hair and the jet black voice'? What's It All About? is Cilla's own story, told for the first time ever. It's the story of a woman who has worked ceaselessly to stay at the top for forty years despite setbacks and personal tragedy; a life of incredible highs and terrible lows. In this deeply personal autobiography she tells her unique story in intimate and vivid detail for the very first time. This is the real Cilla Black.
The Road Ahead
Bill Gates - 1995
Includes a compact disc which is playable on CD-ROM and audio CD players.
The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution
Gregory Zuckerman - 2019
No other investor--Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, Ray Dalio, Steve Cohen, or George Soros--can touch his record. Since 1988, Renaissance's signature Medallion fund has generated average annual returns of 66 percent. The firm has earned profits of more than $100 billion; Simons is worth twenty-three billion dollars.Drawing on unprecedented access to Simons and dozens of current and former employees, Zuckerman, a veteran Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, tells the gripping story of how a world-class mathematician and former code breaker mastered the market. Simons pioneered a data-driven, algorithmic approach that's sweeping the world.As Renaissance became a market force, its executives began influencing the world beyond finance. Simons became a major figure in scientific research, education, and liberal politics. Senior executive Robert Mercer is more responsible than anyone else for the Trump presidency, placing Steve Bannon in the campaign and funding Trump's victorious 2016 effort. Mercer also impacted the campaign behind Brexit.The Man Who Solved the Market is a portrait of a modern-day Midas who remade markets in his own image, but failed to anticipate how his success would impact his firm and his country. It's also a story of what Simons's revolution means for the rest of us.
Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science
Lawrence M. Krauss - 2011
Here Lawrence M. Krauss, himself a theoretical physicist and best-selling author, offers a unique scientific biography: a rollicking narrative coupled with clear and novel expositions of science at the limits. An immensely colorful persona in and out of the office, Feynman revolutionized our understanding of nature amid a turbulent life. Krauss presents that life—from the death of Feynman’s childhood sweetheart during the Manhattan Project to his reluctant rise as a scientific icon—as seen through the science, providing a new understanding of the legacy of a man who has fascinated millions. An accessible reflection on the issues that drive physics today, Quantum Man captures the story of a man who was willing to break all the rules to tame a theory that broke all the rules.
Tesla, Master of Lightning
Margaret Cheney - 1999
Years in the making, this thoroughly researched volume presents important new materials: archival documents and photographs; excerpts from Tesla's writings, lectures, and diaries; selections from his correspondence (some previously unpublished). By placing Tesla's patents and inventions in historical context, the book documents how aspects of television, X-rays, satellite transmission, and advance defense systems such as the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) were foreshadowed in Tesla's work. The 250 black-and-white and duo tone images create an invaluable record of the man and his times vividly showcasing his inventions and working methods. Tesla: Master of Lightning illuminates the life and grand achievements of this eccentric wizard.
Darwin's Odyssey: The Voyage of the Beagle (Kindle Single)
Kevin Jackson - 2013
For five years in his mid-twenties, he sailed on the BEAGLE around the world, exploring jungles, climbing mountains, trekking across deserts. With every new landfall, he had new adventures: he rode through bandit country, was thrown into jail by revolutionaries, took part in an armed raid with marines, survived two earthquakes, hunted and fished. He suffered the terrible cold and rain of Tierra del Fuego, the merciless heat of the Australian outback and the inner pangs of heartbreak. He also made the discoveries that finally led him to formulate his theory of Natural Selection as the driving force of evolution. The five-year voyage of the BEAGLE was the basis for all Darwin's later work; but it also turned him from a friendly idler into the greatest scientist of his century. Kevin Jackson is a writer, broadcaster and film-maker. His most recent book is Constellation of Genius: 1922 and All That Jazz (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2013). He lives in Cambridge, England.
The Quantum Labyrinth: How Richard Feynman and John Wheeler Revolutionized Time and Reality
Paul Halpern - 2017
A lifelong friendship and enormously productive collaboration was born, despite sharp differences in personality. The soft-spoken Wheeler, though conservative in appearance, was a raging nonconformist full of wild ideas about the universe. The boisterous Feynman was a cautious physicist who believed only what could be tested. Yet they were complementary spirits. Their collaboration led to a complete rethinking of the nature of time and reality. It enabled Feynman to show how quantum reality is a combination of alternative, contradictory possibilities, and inspired Wheeler to develop his landmark concept of wormholes, portals to the future and past. Together, Feynman and Wheeler made sure that quantum physics would never be the same again.
Endurance: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Emil Zátopek
Rick Broadbent - 2016
He is famed for setting a raft of world records and winning the Olympic ten thousand meters in London in 1948, followed by the remarkable and unprecedented wins of the five thousand meters, ten thousand meters, and marathon four years later in Helsinki. His story, however, goes way beyond races and results.From a lowly factory worker, “the Czech Locomotive” became a global hero. But at a time of political instability Zátopek risked everything for the love of his friends and country and soon found himself cast adrift into political exile.At its heart, this is a love story, as Emil courts and marries Dana, a promising javelin thrower. Born on the same day, they end up winning Olympic gold medals within half an hour of each other. With the unprecedented involvement of Dana, award-winning Times author Rick Broadbent has gained unique access to a dramatic past involving blood, guns, and the love that sustained beatings by Soviet henchmen and the cruelest twists of fate.With traces of Chariots of Fire and Laura Hillenbrand's New York Times bestseller and film Unbroken, this is both a beautiful love story and a landmark tale of hope and strength in the face of crushing injustices.
The Quantum Astrologer's Handbook
Michael Brooks - 2017
It resurrects from the vaults of neglect the polymath Jerome Cardano, a Milanese of the sixteenth century. Who is he? A gambler and blasphemer, inventor and chancer, plagued by demons and anxieties, astrologer to kings, emperors and popes. This stubborn and unworldly man was the son of a lawyer and a brothel keeper, but also a gifted physician and the unacknowledged discoverer of the mathematical foundations of quantum physics. That is the argument of this charming and intoxicatingly clever book, which is truly original in its style, and in the manner of the modernists embodies in its very form its theories about the world.'The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook' is a science book with the panache of a novel, for readers of Carlo Rovelli or Umberto Eco. It is a work of and about genius.
The Quotable Einstein
Alice Calaprice - 1996
I am only passionately curious.I have reached an age when, if someone tells me to wear socks, I don't have to.--Albert EinsteinAlbert Einstein was a prolific--and often thoughtful and gifted--writer, and he is immensely quotable. This collection of approximately 550 quotations by and about Einstein for the first time arranges his thoughts and ideas thematically. Here we can easily find Einstein's thoughts on everything from America and Americans, Germans and Germany, Jews and Zionism, war and peace, politics, religion and science, to more personal subjects, such as abortion, youth and aging, love and marriage, music, and pets. There is something to please everyone--and something to offend everyone. Also included are sections on what Einstein has said about other famous people, what others have said about him, a chronology including biographical data, an updated family tree that includes great-great-grandchildren, answers to the most common questions about Einstein, and a selected bibliography. The book includes an engaging foreword by Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson.To help the reader or researcher, two indexes are provided. The Index of Key Words will help readers find familiar quotations, and the Subject Index will lead them to subjects of particular interest. The book provides documentation, generally of primary sources such as the Einstein Archive and The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein.This book introduces readers to Einstein's many sides: by turns irascible and benign, warmly humorous and coldly dismissive, one who was at first bemused by the fame the world bestowed on him but who came to abhor the glare of publicity. We also see Einstein's development from the earliest quotations of a seventeen-year-old boy to his final words at age seventy-six.-- "The Bloomsbury Review"
Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend
Paul Karl Feyerabend - 1995
Finished only weeks before his death in 1994, it is the self-portrait of one of this century's most original and influential intellectuals.Trained in physics and astronomy, Feyerabend was best known as a philosopher of science. But he emphatically was not a builder of theories or a writer of rules. Rather, his fame was in powerful, plain-spoken critiques of "big" science and "big" philosophy. Feyerabend gave voice to a radically democratic "epistemological anarchism:" he argued forcefully that there is not one way to knowledge, but many principled paths; not one truth or one rationality but different, competing pictures of the workings of the world. "Anything goes," he said about the ways of science in his most famous book, Against Method. And he meant it.Here, for the first time, Feyerabend traces the trajectory that led him from an isolated, lower-middle-class childhood in Vienna to the height of international academic success. He writes of his experience in the German army on the Russian front, where three bullets left him crippled, impotent, and in lifelong pain. He recalls his promising talent as an operatic tenor (a lifelong passion), his encounters with everyone from Martin Buber to Bertolt Brecht, innumerable love affairs, four marriages, and a career so rich he once held tenured positions at four universities at the same time.Although not written as an intellectual autobiography, Killing Time sketches the people, ideas, and conflicts of sixty years. Feyerabend writes frankly of complicated relationships with his mentor Karl Popper and his friend and frequent opponent Imre Lakatos, and his reactions to a growing reputation as the "worst enemy of science."
Carnegie
Peter Krass - 2002
He used his wealth to ascend the world's political stage, influencing the presidencies of Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt. In retirement, Carnegie became an avid promoter of world peace, only to be crushed emotionally by World War I.In this compelling biography, Peter Krass reconstructs the complicated life of this titan who came to power in America's Gilded Age. He transports the reader to Carnegie's Pittsburgh, where hundreds of smoking furnaces belched smoke into the sky and the air was filled with acrid fumes . . . and mill workers worked seven-day weeks while Carnegie spent months traveling across Europe.Carnegie explores the contradictions in the life of the man who rose from lowly bobbin boy to build the largest and most profitable steel company in the world. Krass examines how Carnegie became one of the greatest philanthropists ever known-and earned a notorious reputation that history has yet to fully reconcile with his remarkable accomplishments.