This month I’m blogging about Autumnal books, all the books I’ve read this month. Some are more obvious Autumnal than others, but I think all of them are lovely to read on a colder day with a blanket and a hot tea (or any kind of beverages you fancy).
I mentioned in the last book round-up that I was one book away from my 52. I surpassed this target this month with the 4 books I’ve read.
The Little Book of LYKKE. The Danish search for the world’s happiest people by Meik Wiking
I already blogged about The Little Book of LYKKE. It’s the perfect Autumnal book.
The Intel Trinity How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World’s Most Important Company by Michael S. Malone
The book is about Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andrew Grove. I liked reading about their lives. I discovered the book by chance. When I was reading Becoming Steve Jobs in May, and the authors mentioned Grove, so I searched for books related to him.
The book is a journey from Fairchild to Intel. There are many details about them and about Intel, their professional lives and what they achieved. Besides this, the author talks about their private live too.
Robert Noyce’s story is interesting, but Malone is biased and that is visible in the whole book. He is also biased against Steve Jobs, and it gets tiring at times. Gordon Moore seems like an amazing guy, again, Malone will keep saying the same thing about Moore until it gets tiring. My favourite was Andrew Grove. His story is emotional. He, a Jew, survived WWII in Hungary, but was forced to flee under the communist era. He ended up in US and managed to make a fantastic life to himself. He never went to Hungary again, easy to understand why. His story was amazing and I wished Malone would have talked more about him.
I enjoyed the book. It has some technical data that I think it would have been better left out, but not a lot, so not an issue. Also, less talk about Noyce’s genius and Moore’s law would have made the book even more enjoyable. A 3.5 out of 5 for me. I would recommend it though, if you ever owned a PC or a laptop with Intel Inside, then you will find it interesting.
Women in Mathematics. From Hypatia to Emmy Noether by Joaquin Navarro
I loved this book. Is another one from the National Geographic series called Our mathematical world. The women are presented in chronological order.
The first is the story of Hypatia, an amazing woman that lived in the 4th century in Alexandria. As she was an astronomer and a mathematician, she was excommunicated by Christians, who didn’t understand what astronomy was. Christians snatched Hypatia from her carriage, beat her, stripped her, mutilated her in a temple and stripped the flesh from her bones with oyster shells (or roof tiles, the translation is not clear). They burned her remains. As a result, the Patriach Cyril was made a saint 30 years later. Later, bishops decided that Hypatia was satanic and Cyril was obviously right to do what he did. More annoyingly, a movie was made in 2009 about her, with a few adjustments like she was prepared to die willingly and painlessly, killed by a slave. But the movie got the approval of the Vatican, obviously… If her story made an impression on you as much as it did on me, remember two things she said:
“It is a terrible thing to teach superstitions as if they were truths”.
“Preserve your right to think; it is better that you risk erring than commit the sin of not thinking”.
All other stories are interesting, Italian, French, Russian, the well-known British Ada Lovelace and Florence Nightingale. The book made me want to read more about women in mathematics, and other sciences too.
A New Way of Seeing the World. Fractal geometry by Maria Isabel Binimelis Bassa
Well, there is nothing autumnal about this book besides me reading it in autumn. That being said, I liked it. I think fractals look interesting and I enjoyed reading about fractal geometry. As most books in this series by National Geographic, it does accentuate the mathematical part and is less of a story in parts.
If you are interested in fractals, then this is the book for you.
