by John Allen Paulos ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 28, 1991
Maybe there is a royal road to mathematics, after all. If so, Paulos is motoring on it in the driver's seat with this wide- ranging follow-up to his best-selling Innumeracy (1988). In the course of 320 pages, Paulos introduces the reader to mathematics ancient and modern: from Euclid to chaos, pi to probability theory, the Fibonacci series to fractals. And all in truly short-takes (one or two pages per entry), which, one discovers, are presented in alphabetical order. This makes it easy to use the book as a reference while calming the mathematically anxious who might fear taking longer or deeper plunges into any subject. Yet Paulos does not trivialize. His clearly stated objective is to right the wrongs that drill, formulas, and endless exercises have wrought in high-school classrooms. Mathematics is a language with structure and logic, elegance and beauty. Its interpreters can be purists who deplore finding any use for math or practical-minded thinkers who apply its tools and techniques to physics and engineering. Bridging the two are those mathematical excursions into number theory, set theory, or non-Euclidean geometry that turn out to be models of the natural world-of the way flowers grow, quarks interact, or how the universe is shaped. Paulos tells it all like the gifted teacher he is, combining the mathematical lore with asides on culture and personalities. Galois died at age 21 in a duel over a prostitute; Gîdel died of malnutrition occasioned by ``personality disturbances.'' And so on and on in what one would like to see become an infinite series.
Pub Date: April 28, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-58640-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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