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Why Beauty is Truth
A History of Symmetry
New York City : Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group, 2007.
Format: Book
Description: xiii, 290 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
At the heart of relativity theory, quantum mechanics, string theory, and much of modern cosmology lies one concept: symmetry. In Why Beauty Is Truth , world-famous mathematician Ian Stewart narrates the history of the emergence of this remarkable area of study. Stewart introduces us to such characters as the Renaissance Italian genius, rogue, scholar, and gambler Girolamo Cardano, who stole the modern method of solving cubic equations and published it in the first important book on algebra, and the young revolutionary Evariste Galois, who refashioned the whole of mathematics and founded the field of group theory only to die in a pointless duel over a woman before his work was published. Stewart also explores the strange numerology of real mathematics, in which particular numbers have unique and unpredictable properties related to symmetry. He shows how Wilhelm Killing discovered "Lie groups" with 14, 52, 78, 133, and 248 dimensions-groups whose very existence is a profound puzzle. Finally, Stewart describes the world beyond superstrings: the "octonionic" symmetries that may explain the very existence of the universe.
Contents:
The scribes of Babylon -- The household name -- The Arabian poet -- The gambling scholar -- The cunning fox -- The frustrated doctor and the sickly genius --The luckless revolutionary -- The mediocre engineer and the transcendent professor -- The drunken vandal -- The would-be soldier and the weakly bookworm -- The clerk from the patent office -- A quantum quintet -- The five-dimensional man -- The political journalist -- A muddle of mathematicians -- Seekers after truth and beauty.
ISBN:
046508236X
Availability | |||
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Call Number | Location | Shelf Location | Status |
SCIENCE Physics Ste | Main (Downtown) | Third Level, Nonfiction | In |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-282) and index.