Why Beauty is Truth: The Story of Symmetry
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An eminent teacher and writer explores an idea both simple and complex, both multidisciplinary and unifying-the story of symmetryPublishers WeeklyAnyone who thinks math is dull will be delightfully surprised by this history of the concept of symmetry. Stewart, a professor of mathematics at the University of Warwick (Does God Play Dice?), presents a time line of discovery that begins in ancient Babylon and travels forward to today's cutting-edge theoretical physics. He defines basic symmetry as a transformation, "a way to move an object" that leaves the object essentially unchanged in appearance. And while the math behind symmetry is important, the heart of this history lies in its characters, from a hypothetical Babylonian scribe with a serious case of math anxiety, through Evariste Galois (inventor of "group theory"), killed at 21 in a duel, and William Hamilton, whose eureka moment came in "a flash of intuition that caused him to vandalize a bridge," to Albert Einstein and the quantum physicists who used group theory and symmetry to describe the universe. Stewart does use equations, but nothing too scary; a suggested reading list is offered for more rigorous details. Stewart does a fine job of balancing history and mathematical theory in a book as easy to enjoy as it is to understand. Line drawings. (Apr.) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
Preface ixThe Scribes of Babylon 1The Household Name 17The Persian Poet 33The Gambling Scholar 45The Cunning Fox 63The Frustrated Doctor and the Sickly Genius 75The Luckless Revolutionary 97The Mediocre Engineer and the Transcendent Professor 125The Drunken Vandal 137The Would-Be Soldier and the Weakly Bookworm 159The Clerk from the Patent Office 173A Quantum Quintet 199The Five-Dimensional Man 221The Political Journalist 243A Muddle of Mathematicians 259Seekers after Truth and Beauty 275Further Reading 281Index 283
