Ferguson shows the main currents clearly, without complicated math, although readers with some knowledge of geometry and...
A stimulating, wide-ranging look at how the Greek mathematician and philosopher’s key insights have been at the heart of an enormous range of subsequent thought.
Mention Pythagoras and most people think of the geometrical theorem that bears his name. Science writer Ferguson (Tycho & Kepler, 2003, etc.) shows how much more his ideas have meant to both science and philosophy. Biographical data is sparse: Pythagoras was probably born around 570 BCE on the Aegean isle Samos, studied in Asia and possibly Egypt and settled in Croton, a Greek colony in southern Italy. There he founded a school of philosophy based on mathematics. A key discovery was that a vibrating string produces pleasing harmonies when divided into simple ratios. From this insight, the Pythagoreans posited that numbers lie behind all of nature. In particular, they believed in the music of the spheres, caused by the movement of the planets. They were also vegetarians and believed in reincarnation. Ferguson traces the ways in which later philosophers drew on their central ideas. Plato, who met some of Pythagoras’s disciples during a visit to Italy, used a geometrical proof in one of his dialogues and was thought by his successors to have drawn heavily on Pythagorean doctrines. Plato’s pervasive influence on later philosophers meant that Pythagorean ideas concerning mathematics were transmitted down the ages and can be found not only in philosophy, but in astronomy and the other exact sciences. This holds especially true for the music of the spheres, which was taken literally by no less a scientist than Kepler and served as an important metaphor for major poets into the 19th century. The Pythagorean faith in the mathematical foundation and ultimate comprehensibility of the universe played a key role in physics, from Newton through Einstein right up to today’s string theories.
Ferguson shows the main currents clearly, without complicated math, although readers with some knowledge of geometry and music theory are most likely to enjoy the book.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1631-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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