Einstein's Heroes: Imagining the World through the Language of Mathematics
Einstein respected Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, and James Clerk Maxwell more than all the rest of his scientific forebears. They discovered and formulated the physical theories that enabled his theories of relativity. They communicated directly to Einstein, for despite being Anglophone while he was Germanophone, they shared the language of mathematics (though the largely self-taught Faraday ruefully confessed knowing only the dialect, so to speak, of geometry). That common language is Arianrhod's ground theme as she recaps the work of Einstein's heroes, and the story behind their stories is the development of mathematics into a means not just of accurate physical description of known reality but also of finding further reality. Newton "found" gravity by means of analytical geometry, Faraday "found" electrical fields by noting the behavior of magnetized iron filings, and Maxwell created the laws of thermodynamics by "flipping" Newton's method (from integral to differential calculus) to describe Faraday's fields. Arianrhod's achievement is to so masterfully combine history, biography, and mathematics as to absorb and enlighten even the mathematically maladroit.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.