In 1851, struggling, self-taught physicist Lǒn Foucault performed a dramatic demonstration inside the Panthǒn in Paris. By tracking a pendulum's path as it swung repeatedly across the interior of the large ceremonial hall, Foucault offered the first definitive proof -- before an audience that comprised the cream of Parisian society, including the future emperor, Napoleon III -- that the earth revolves on its axis. In this book, Amir Aczel has revealed...

Documents the efforts of a French Jesuit priest to confront the struggle between science and religion upon his 1929 discovery of the Peking Man pre-human skull that represented a missing link between erect hunting apes and the human race's Cro-Magnon ancestors. In December 1929, in a cave near Peking, diggers for an international team of scientists that included a French Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pulled from the rubble a skull...

Chance defines our life. Will you get the job, the lover, the money? Now Amir Aczel, in this slim book modeled on his very successful Fermat's Last Theorem, gives readers the tools to minimize, or maximize, chance's effect on their lives. Chance marks Aczel's return to his preferred field: the popularization of mathematics. Here, Aczel explores probability theory and its daily, practical applications, while along the way relating stories of inveterate...

"In the late 19th century, a brilliant mathematician languished in an asylum. His greatest accomplishment, the result of a series of leaps of insight, was his pioneering understanding of the nature of infinity. This is the story of Georg Cantor: how he came to his theories and the reverberations of his work, the consequences of which shape our world." "Cantor's theory of the infinite is famous for its many seeming contradictions: for example, we can...

The story of Fermat's last theorem, that the square of a whole number can be broken down into two other squares of whole numbers but the same cannot be done with cubes or higher powers. After three hundred years, a proof for the theorem was developed by Princeton-based mathematician Andrew Wiles.

"A real-life mathematical mystery Nicolas Bourbaki was perhaps the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century. Responsible for the emergence of the "new math" that swept through American and foreign education systems in the middle of the century, Bourbaki originated the modern concept of the mathematical proof and is credited with the introduction of rigor into the discipline. It can be said that no working mathematician in the world today is...