Authors: Arild Stubhaug.
Hardcover, 600 pages
Publisher: Springer
Publication Date: 2002-01-10
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    Sophus Lie (1842-1899) is without doubt one of Norway's greatest scientific talents. His mathematical works have made him famous around the world no less than Niels Henrik Abel. The terms Lie groups and Lie algebra are today part of the standard mathematical vocabulary.
In his comprehensive biography the author Arild Stubhaug let us come close to both the person Sophus Lie and his time. We follow him through childhood at the vicarage in Nordfjordeid, his growing up in Moss, school and studying in Christiania, travelling in Europe and his contacts with the leading mathematicians of his time. The academic and scientific career brought Lie from Christiania to Leipzig as professor, before the attempt to call him back to Norway, when she stood on the threshhold to national sovereignty, was successful....

Authors: Wambui Waiyaki Otieno.
Hardcover, 255 pages
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
Publication Date: 1998-07

Authors: Fredric Alan Maxwell.
Hardcover, 288 pages
Publisher: William Morrow
Publication Date: 2002-09-01
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

    Steve Ballmer has been with Bill Gates from the beginning when the bespectacled computer geek convinced him to drop out of Stanford Business School. The grandson of a Russian Czarist soldier and the son of a Swiss immigrant father, Ballmer is the Microsoft wizard's main man - the only American to become, by 40, a decabillionaire while working for someone else. He is a man known for his ruthless negotiating tactics and a management style that has earned him the nickname "The Em-Balmer". In this revealing biography - based on in-depth study and interviews with Microsoft insiders - Fredric Alan Maxwell provides fascinating new insights into the longstanding "marriage" between this odd couple of Ballmer and Gates. Maxwell also tells the full story of a man so shamelessly arrogant that he told reporters "to heck with Janet Reno", so intense and aggressive that he ripped his vocal cords by talking too loudly. Eye opening and thorough, BAD BOY BALLMER is a shocking look at one of the masterminds of the technological age....

Authors: Michael Katz. Robert Levering. Moskowitz.
Hardcover, 481 pages
Publisher: Dutton Adult
Publication Date: 1984-11-01

Authors:
Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 1997-03-27
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

    Communications thinker and prophet Marshall McLuhan gave us the phrases "the medium is the message" and "global village". Today, with the explosion of electronic technologies and on-line communication, his ideas are more relevant than ever. Forward Through the Rearview Mirror is an evocative and visually exciting exploration of McLuhan's life and work in the context of the information age. The book consists of short prose passages, aphorisms, interviews, letters, and dialogues by McLuhan—many never before published—interwoven with biographical text by his biographer Philip Marchand and commentary by such cultural critics as Louis Rossetto, Neil Postman, Camille Paglia, and Lewis Lapham.

The book is organized into four parts: Global Village and Identity, Medium is the Message, and Extensions of Man. In keeping with McLuhan's style of speaking and writing, the text consists of a series of brief entries, ranging in length from a single line to a page. The entries have been selected and positioned so that they can be read consecutively as a narrative or randomly as individual ideas. Throughout, the material by McLuhan appears in a different typeface and color from the material by others, to make the two clearly distinguishable. Part book, part magazine, part storyboard, this multidimensional look at the ideas and life of the patron saint of Wired magazine will appeal to anyone interested in technology, contemporary thought, and popular culture....

    Sixties media theorist Marshall McLuhan understood the implications of emerging mass media on society. This book revisits McLuhan's insights in the wake of our digital communications and technological progress. How have his concepts held up? Very well indeed, apparently, as we see in this book, which presents excerpts of McLuhan's work and commentary from today's thinkers about media, including Lewis Lapham, Neil Postman, and Robert Fulford. McLuhan has been called the patron saint of the digital revolution, and this book is a testament and proof that he deserves the title. ...

Authors: Marian te Wechel.
Paperback, 278 pages
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
Publication Date: 2007-10-23


Reviews :

    La vida es... desarrolla una visión de la vida basada en los fundamentos de la Medicina Tradicional China, aplicando éstos al equilibrio emocional de forma accesible para todo el mundo. Estos fundamentos, el principio Yin-Yang y la Teoría de los Cinco Elementos, tienen sus raíces en la obra "I Ching, el libro de las mutaciones" que nos enseña cómo se puede actuar de acuerdo con las "fuerzas vitales primordiales" para afrontar la vida de forma constructiva.

Aunque en el I Ching se revelan los principios vitales primordiales aplicándolos a la vida humana y sus conflictos, los antiguos médicos chinos aplicaron estos principios a la fisiología de nuestro organismo. Desarrollaron desde ahí una medicina basada en la armonización de las interacciones entre las fuerzas vitales naturales que logra equilibrar el funcionamiento orgánico de nuestro cuerpo, consiguiendo así que la naturaleza misma cure las enfermedades.

En La vida es... se recorre este camino a la inversa: se conjuga la metodología de la medicina china con la sabiduría del I Ching. Al aplicar a los principios primordiales que el I Ching describe para la vida en sí, el sistema metodológico que la medicina china ha desarrollado para equilibrar la dinámica entre las fuerzas vitales primordiales, se emplea este sistema para el mantenimiento y la recuperación del equilibrio emocional y para la comprensión y solución de todo tipo de conflictos.

Al procurar que tanto el lenguaje enigmático y simbólico del I Ching como el de la medicina china se hagan accesibles de forma rigurosa y clara, es este un libro apropiado para todo aquel interesado en la vida. Aplicado a la vida humana, se explica cómo se manifiestan las fuerzas vitales primordiales, las normas según las cuales éstas actúan e interactúan entre sí y de qué manera podemos cooperar con ellas para mantener y recuperar nuestro equilibrio emocional y crear un mundo mejor....

Authors: Pamela McCorduck.
Paperback, 600 pages
Publisher: AK Peters
Publication Date: 2004-03
Edition: 2

Reviews :

    Pamela McCorduck revisits the artificial intelligence arena and updates this look at the history and future of artificial intelligence with over 100 pages of new material. This book should inspire anyone interested in human intelligence and the future of machine intelligence. The reader should not be surprised to find out that there is much more to AI than simple robots and manufacturing automation....

Authors: Doron Swade.
Hardcover, 352 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown
Publication Date: 2000-04-13


Reviews :

    In 1821, 30-year-old inventor and mathematician Charles Babbage was poring over a set of printed mathematical tables with his friend, the astronomer John Herschel. Finding error after error in the manually evaluated results, Babbage made an exclamation, the consequences of which would not only dominate the remaining 50 years of his life, but also lay the foundations for the modern computer industry: 'I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!' A few days later, he set down a plan to build a machine that would carry out complex mathematical calculations without human intervention and, at least in theory, without human errors. The only technology to which he had access for solving the problem was the cogwheel escapement found inside clocks. Babbage saw that a machine constructed out of hundreds of escapements, cunningly and precisely linked, might be able to handle calculations mechanically. The story of his lifelong bid to construct such a machine is a triumph of human ingenuity, will and imagination....

Authors: Jon Agar.
Paperback, 106 pages
Publisher: Totem Books
Publication Date: 2001-06-25


Reviews :

    Alan Turning is widely known as the cryptographer extraordinaire of Bletchly Park, the man who broke the Nazi Enigma code. He has also been described as the father of the modern computer, dreaming of a machine that could think adn inaugurating a scientific revolution that we are deep in the midst of today. His work entailed too a challenge to the science of ourselves, exploring the limits between the human and technological....

Authors: William Aspray.
Hardcover, 394 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 1990-12-07


Reviews :

    John von Neumann (1903-1957) was unquestionably one of the most brilliant scientists of the twentieth century. He made major contributions to quantum mechanics and mathematical physics and in 1943 began a new and all-too-short career in computer science. William Aspray provides the first broad and detailed account of von Neumann's many different contributions to computing. These, Aspray reveals, extended far beyond his well-known work in the design and construction of computer systems to include important scientific applications, the revival of numerical analysis, and the creation of a theory of computing.

Aspray points out that from the beginning von Neumann took a wider and more theoretical view than other computer pioneers. In the now famous EDVAC report of 1945, von Neumann clearly stated the idea of a stored program that resides in the computer's memory along with the data it was to operate on. This stored program computer was described in terms of idealized neurons, highlighting the analogy between the digital computer and the human brain. Aspray describes von Neumann's development during the next decade, and almost entirely alone, of a theory of complicated information processing systems, or automata, and the introduction of themes such as learning, reliability of systems with unreliable components, self-replication, and the importance of memory and storage capacity in biological nervous systems; many of these themes remain at the heart of current investigations in parallel or neurocomputing.

Aspray allows the record to speak for itself. He unravels an intricate sequence of stories generated by von Neumann's work and brings into focus the interplay of personalities centered about von Neumann. He documents the complex interactions of science, the military, and business and shows how progress in applied mathematics was intertwined with that in computers....

    In the mid 1940s, John von Neumann revolutionized the nascent field of computing by showing that program instructions could be stored in a computer's memory instead of on external panels or punch cards. In John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing, William Aspray details the design and construction of von Neumann's computer systems and explains the broader implications of von Neumann's contributions. Aspray discusses von Neumann's fame in the realms of mathematics, physics, and economics and his remarkable career, which included work as an atomic energy commissioner and as principal scientific adviser to the U.S. Air Force on ballistic missile development. By examining the interplay of science, military, and business, which formed the background for von Neumann's work, Aspray does an excellent job of placing von Neumann's accomplishments in computer science into the context of his other achievements....