Added by: susan6th | Karma: 3133.45 | Fiction literature | 25 February 2010
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The Infinite Sea
Interstellar troubleshooter John Bandicut returns for an amiably routine third installment (after Strange Attractors) in Carvel's Chaos Chronicles, journeying to a world where the dominant civilization, the Neri, live under the sea. There, Bandicut and his motley crew (comprised of three aliens, two robots and an artificial intelligence in Bandicut's brain), aided by "translator-stones" that let him communicate with other species, deal with two menaces
An examination of Infinity — in history and science — with excursions into literature and philosophy, written by one of the most successful writers of popular science. Infinity is surely the strangest idea that humans have ever thought. Where did it come from and what is it telling us about our Universe? Can there actually be infinities? Or is infinity just a label for something that is never reached, no matter how long you go on counting?Can you do an infinite number of things in a finite amount of time?Is the universe infinite?
The Art of the Infinite: The Pleasures of Mathematics
Robert Kaplan, writing together with his
wife Ellen Kaplan, once again takes us on a witty, literate, and
accessible tour of the world of mathematics. Where The Nothing That Is
looked at math through the lens of zero, The Art of the Infinite
takes infinity, in its countless guises, as a touchstone for
understanding mathematical thinking. Tracing a path from Pythagoras,
whose great Theorem led inexorably to a discovery that his followers
tried in vain to keep secret (the existence of irrational numbers);
through Descartes and Leibniz; to the brilliant, haunted Georg Cantor,
who proved that infinity can come in different sizes, the Kaplans show
how the attempt to grasp the ungraspable embodies the essence of
mathematics ...