(no subject)

[aliseadae]

What math or science books do you recommend? I'm especially looking for biographies of mathematicians or scientists, interesting math books, interesting physics books, interesting chem books. (That is in order from more to less interesting to me right now.)

Comments

[seabream.livejournal.com]

Disclosure: I've not yet gotten around to finishing it, amd it's been some years since I've picked it up, but what I remember of what I've read of it was interesting. It does tend to come up on lists of this sort, so you may already have read it. For that matter, I may have mentioned it before and forgotten. It's also not precisely any of the types of books that you've said you're interested in, though I would call it a science book of sorts, inasmuch as it's not a biography, it's not a math, or physics, or chemistry book, but contains enough elements from several of the categories that the interest in the subject matters may be transferable. It's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. While not a biography of any of the title figures, it does describe parts of their lives and works and uses them to talk about the development of meanings, concepts, and proofs. It also uses its structure and wordplay to the same ends. Of course, logicians and mathematicians are not the same, but depending on what precisely your interest in mathematicians and scientists is, this may fit. If not, my apologies. I look forward to reading other people's recommendations.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

In the chemistry area, there's Primo Levi's The Periodic Table and then Carole Angier's The Double Bond: Primo Levi: A Biography.

Madison Smartt Bell, Lavoisier in Year One: The Birth of a New Science in an Age of Revolution
Renee Bergland, Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics
Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (I know a bunch of other Oppie books and Manhattan Project books if you get obsessed, but this is a very good place to start)
Chandler Burr, The Emperor of Scent
K. C. Cole, Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up
Richard Cytowic
Antonio Damasio
Freeman Dyson
Shelley Emling, Marie Curie and Her Daughters: The Private Lives of Science's First Family
Zakaria Erzinclioglu, Maggots, Murder, and Men
Patricia Fara, Sex, Botany, and Empire
Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom (if you're willing to take the title with a grain of salt)
Richard Feynman and of course the standard Feynman bio by James Gleick, and then the other things James Gleick does
Barbara Goldsmith, Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie (better this than the other if you only want one Marie Curie book)
Istvan Hargittai, Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century
Bernd Heinrich
Alan Hirshfeld
Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth
Lisa Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution
George Johnson, Miss Leavitt's Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How To Measure the Universe
Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air
Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation
Clea Koff, The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist's Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo
Michael D. Lemonick, The Georgian Star: How William and Caroline Herschel Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Cosmos
A. R. Luria
John McPhee, Annals of the Former World
Roger Osborne, The Floating Egg: Episodes in the Making of Geology
David Quammen
Richard Rhodes
Tony Rice, Voyages of Discovery: Three Centuries of Natural History Exploration
Oliver Sacks (!!!!)

[selidor]

Bright Star: a biography of Beatrice Hill Tinsley
Extreme Cosmos, Bryan Gaensler
Five Billion Years of Solitude, Lee Billings. Why and how we're searching for exoplanets. This one nearly made me cry.