Go to Hachette Book Group home

Search

Why Beauty Is Truth

A History of Symmetry

Why Beauty Is Truth Open the full-size image

Contributors

By Ian Stewart

Formats and Prices

Price

$21.99

Price

$28.99 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. Trade Paperback $21.99 $28.99 CAD
  2. ebook $11.99 $15.99 CAD

Also available from:

At the heart of relativity theory, quantum mechanics, string theory, and much of modern cosmology lies one concept: symmetry. In Why Beauty Is Truth, world-famous mathematician Ian Stewart narrates the history of the emergence of this remarkable area of study. Stewart introduces us to such characters as the Renaissance Italian genius, rogue, scholar, and gambler Girolamo Cardano, who stole the modern method of solving cubic equations and published it in the first important book on algebra, and the young revolutionary Evariste Galois, who refashioned the whole of mathematics and founded the field of group theory only to die in a pointless duel over a woman before his work was published. Stewart also explores the strange numerology of real mathematics, in which particular numbers have unique and unpredictable properties related to symmetry. He shows how Wilhelm Killing discovered “Lie groups” with 14, 52, 78, 133, and 248 dimensions-groups whose very existence is a profound puzzle. Finally, Stewart describes the world beyond superstrings: the “octonionic” symmetries that may explain the very existence of the universe.

Genre:

On Sale
Apr 29, 2008
Page Count
304 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9780465082377

You May Also Like

Lucid Dying
Lucid Dying $32.00 $41.00 CAD
Do I Know You?
Do I Know You? $32.00 $41.00 CAD
Mapping the Darkness
Mapping the Darkness $32.50 $41.00 CAD
Hurts So Good
Hurts So Good $18.99 $23.99 CAD
Where We Meet the World
Where We Meet the World $30.00 $38.00 CAD

Ian Stewart

About the Author

Ian Stewart is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick. He is the accessible and successful (and prolific) author of numerous Basic books on mathematics including, most recently, Calculating the Cosmos. Stewart is also a regular research visitor at the University of Houston, the Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications in Minneapolis, and the Santa Fe Institute. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. His writing has appeared in New Scientist, Discover, Scientific American, and many newspapers in the U.K. and U.S. He lives in Coventry, England.

Learn more about this author