Author : Robert Kanigel
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 22,38 MB
Release : 2016-04-26
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1476763496
A biography of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. The book gives a detailed account of his upbringing in India, his mathematical achievements, and his mathematical collaboration with English mathematician G. H. Hardy. The book also reviews the life of Hardy and the academic culture of Cambridge University during the early twentieth century.
Author : Stuart Rojstaczer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 26,65 MB
Release : 1999-09-02
Category : Education
ISBN : 019535205X
Amid the clamorous debates on political correctness, the Western canon, and alcohol abuse on campus, many observers have failed to notice the most radical change in the American University: the Golden Age of massive government funding is gone. And, as Stuart Rojstaczer points out in this incisive look at higher education, the consequences are affecting virtually every aspect of university life. Laced with humorous and insightful anecdotes, Gone for Good is a highly personal tour of the university system as it has evolved from the glory days of phenomenal post-WWII growth to the financial stresses that now beset it. Stuart Rojstaczer, professor of Hydrology at Duke, shows how almost unlimited funding during the Cold War years encouraged universities to become unwieldy behemoths--with ever-enlarging faculties and administrative staffs, an explosion of new buildings that are proving costly to maintain, and a parade of programs designed largely to impress other universities. Rojstaczer asserts that despite the scarcity of new funding sources, universities continue to strive for unlimited growth--with disastrous results: skyrocketing tuition (well over $20,000 per year at top tier schools); desperate attempts to increase enrollments (lower standards, inflated grades, and new majors in some rather implausible areas of study); and increasing pressure on faculty who already spend more time researching than teaching to raise more money through research grants. The time has come, Rojstaczer argues, to abandon an outmoded idea of growth and create a leaner university system more beneficial to both students and society. For parents, students, and anyone interested higher education, Gone for Good offers a vivid account of the crossroads where universities now stand--and a compelling argument about which path they should take.
Author : Juli Berwald
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 28,81 MB
Release : 2018-11-06
Category : Nature
ISBN : 0735211280
"A book full of wonders" —Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk "Witty, insightful. . . .The story of jellyfish. . . is a significant part of the environmental story. Berwald's engaging account of these delicate, often ignored creatures shows how much they matter to our oceans' future." —New York Times Book Review Jellyfish have been swimming in our oceans for well over half a billion years, longer than any other animal that lives on the planet. They make a venom so toxic it can kill a human in three minutes. Their sting—microscopic spears that pierce with five million times the acceleration of gravity—is the fastest known motion in the animal kingdom. Made of roughly 95 percent water, some jellies are barely perceptible virtuosos of disguise, while others glow with a luminescence that has revolutionized biotechnology. Yet until recently, jellyfish were largely ignored by science, and they remain among the most poorly understood of ocean dwellers. More than a decade ago, Juli Berwald left a career in ocean science to raise a family in landlocked Austin, Texas, but jellyfish drew her back to the sea. Recent, massive blooms of billions of jellyfish have clogged power plants, decimated fisheries, and caused millions of dollars of damage. Driven by questions about how overfishing, coastal development, and climate change were contributing to a jellyfish population explosion, Juli embarked on a scientific odyssey. She traveled the globe to meet the biologists who devote their careers to jellies, hitched rides on Japanese fishing boats to see giant jellyfish in the wild, raised jellyfish in her dining room, and throughout it all marveled at the complexity of these alluring and ominous biological wonders. Gracefully blending personal memoir with crystal-clear distillations of science, Spineless is the story of how Juli learned to navigate and ultimately embrace her ambition, her curiosity, and her passion for the natural world. She discovers that jellyfish science is more than just a quest for answers. It’s a call to realize our collective responsibility for the planet we share.
Author : William Gay
Publisher : Anchor
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 18,97 MB
Release : 2009-09-09
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0307489868
It’s 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman’s Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he’s been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won’t be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he’s an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.’s grandson, is pleased with the old man’s homecoming, but Fleming’s life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre. In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent of violence and redemption–a whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis.
Author : Ken Ono
Publisher : Springer
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 19,3 MB
Release : 2016-04-20
Category : Mathematics
ISBN : 3319255681
"The son of a prominent Japanese mathematician who came to the United States after World War II, Ken Ono was raised on a diet of high expectations and little praise. Rebelling against his pressure-cooker of a life, Ken determined to drop out of high school to follow his own path. To obtain his father’s approval, he invoked the biography of the famous Indian mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan, whom his father revered, who had twice flunked out of college because of his single-minded devotion to mathematics. Ono describes his rocky path through college and graduate school, interweaving Ramanujan’s story with his own and telling how at key moments, he was inspired by Ramanujan and guided by mentors who encouraged him to pursue his interest in exploring Ramanujan’s mathematical legacy. Picking up where others left off, beginning with the great English mathematician G.H. Hardy, who brought Ramanujan to Cambridge in 1914, Ono has devoted his mathematical career to understanding how in his short life, Ramanujan was able to discover so many deep mathematical truths, which Ramanujan believed had been sent to him as visions from a Hindu goddess. And it was Ramanujan who was ultimately the source of reconciliation between Ono and his parents. Ono’s search for Ramanujan ranges over three continents and crosses paths with mathematicians whose lives span the globe and the entire twentieth century and beyond. Along the way, Ken made many fascinating discoveries. The most important and surprising one of all was his own humanity."
Author : Angela Carstensen
Publisher : American Library Association
Page : 175 pages
File Size : 43,60 MB
Release : 2011-05-27
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 083899315X
More than simply a vital collection development tool, this book can help librarians help young adults grow into the kind of independent readers and thinkers who will flourish at college.
Author : Rudy Rucker
Publisher : Macmillan
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 13,33 MB
Release : 2008-07-08
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1466804866
A riveting new science fiction novel from the writer who twice won the Philip K. Dick Award for best SF novel.Bela and Paul, two wild young mathematicians, are friends and roommates, and in love with the same woman, who happens to be Alma, Bela's girlfriend. They fight it out by changing reality using cutting edge math, to change who gets the girl. The contemporary world they live in is not quite this one, but much like Berkeley, California, and the two graduate students are trying to finish their degrees and get jobs. It doesn't help that their unpredictable advisor Roland is a mad mathematical genius who has figured out a way to predict isolated and specific bits of the future that can cause a lot of trouble. . .and he's starting to see monsters in mirrors. Bela and Paul start to mess around with reality, and when that happens, all heaven and hell break loose. Those monsters of Roland's were really there, but who are they? This novel is a romantic comedy with a whole corkscrew of SF twists. At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.
Author : Stuart Rojstaczer
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 383 pages
File Size : 47,83 MB
Release : 2014-09-02
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0143126318
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING DEBUT FICTION For readers of This Is Where I Leave You and Everything Is Illuminated, “a brilliant and compelling family saga full of warmth, pathos, history and humor” (Jonathan Evison, author of West of Here) When the greatest female mathematician in history passes away, her son, Alexander “Sasha” Karnokovitch, just wants to mourn his mother in peace. But rumor has it the notoriously eccentric Polish émigré has solved one of the most difficult problems in all of mathematics, and has spitefully taken the solution to her grave. As a ragtag group of mathematicians from around the world descends upon Rachela’s shiva, determined to find the proof or solve it for themselves—even if it means prying up the floorboards for notes or desperately scrutinizing the mutterings of her African Grey parrot—Sasha must come to terms with his mother’s outsized influence on his life. Spanning decades and continents, from a crowded living room in Madison, Wisconsin, to the windswept beach on the Barents Sea where a young Rachela had her first mathematical breakthrough, The Mathematician’s Shiva is an unexpectedly moving and uproariously funny novel that captures humanity’s drive not just to survive, but to achieve the impossible.
Author : Gaurav Suri
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 25,22 MB
Release : 2010-07-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1400834775
While taking a class on infinity at Stanford in the late 1980s, Ravi Kapoor discovers that he is confronting the same mathematical and philosophical dilemmas that his mathematician grandfather had faced many decades earlier--and that had landed him in jail. Charged under an obscure blasphemy law in a small New Jersey town in 1919, Vijay Sahni is challenged by a skeptical judge to defend his belief that the certainty of mathematics can be extended to all human knowledge--including religion. Together, the two men discover the power--and the fallibility--of what has long been considered the pinnacle of human certainty, Euclidean geometry. As grandfather and grandson struggle with the question of whether there can ever be absolute certainty in mathematics or life, they are forced to reconsider their fundamental beliefs and choices. Their stories hinge on their explorations of parallel developments in the study of geometry and infinity--and the mathematics throughout is as rigorous and fascinating as the narrative and characters are compelling and complex. Moving and enlightening, A Certain Ambiguity is a story about what it means to face the extent--and the limits--of human knowledge.
Author : Beatrice Mosionier
Publisher : Portage & Main Press
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 34,74 MB
Release : 2011-03-17
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1553792076
A revised version of the novel In Search of April Raintree, written specifically for students in grades 9 through 12. Through her characterization of two young sisters who are removed from their family, the author poignantly illustrates the difficulties that many Aboriginal people face in maintaining a positive self-identity.
