Category Archives: Book Reviews

Joao Magueijo has a new book out about Ettore Majorana, entitled A Brilliant Darkness. It’s a lot of fun to read, and could be described as an example of Gonzo history of science. While it contains a lot of factual … Continue reading →

I just finished reading author Masha Gessen’s new book about Grigori Perelman, Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century. It’s a short but very well done account of the life of Grigori Perelman, how he came … Continue reading →

A friend recently loaned me a wonderful book, the recently published Mathematicians: An Outer View of the Inner World, which consists mainly of photographs of mathematicians by Mariana Cook, paired with a page of comments from the mathematician being photographed. … Continue reading →

When I was in Edinburgh I picked up a copy of Graham Farmelo’s new biography of Dirac. It’s entitled The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius, and is not yet available in the US. I read … Continue reading →

I learned recently from Sabine Hossenfelder’s blog that there’s a new book out by Howard Burton, entitled First Principles: The Crazy Business of Doing Serious Science (she has some comments on the book here). It’s a fascinating and entertaining book. … Continue reading →

A colleague has very helpfully provided me with a copy of the murder mystery set at the IHES that I wrote about recently here, and I’ve just finished reading it. Since I’m not much of an afficionado of this genre … Continue reading →

Springer has just published an autobiography of Goro Shimura, entitled The Map of My Life. Shimura’s specialty is the arithmetic theory of modular forms, and he’s responsible for a crucial construction generalizing the modular curve, now known as a “Shimura … Continue reading →

Leonard Susskind has a new book that’s now out in the bookstores, entitled The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. It’s about the black hole information paradox, structured around his … Continue reading →

Note: For a Romanian translation of this post, see here. Felix Berezin Misha Shifman has edited a wonderful book about the mathematician Felix Berezin, which recently appeared with the title Felix Berezin: Life and Death of the Mastermind of Supermathematics. … Continue reading →