Following Scott Aaronson’s advice, I instructed the good folks at Amazon to send me a copy of The Princeton Companion to Mathematics. (In exchange for money, of course.) It’s sprinkled with gems like this, in the article on “Differential Topology” by my former professor Clifford Taubes:
If you are with me so far, suppose now that an advanced alien en route from Arcturus to the galactic center kidnaps you and drops you into some unknown, 2n-dimensional manifold. You suspect that it is Sn x Sn, but you are not sure.
Come on, the screenplay practically writes itself! I’m seeing Ewan McGregor, maybe Natalie Portman. Russell Crowe as the alien. SEEx could help with some of the mathy stuff. If any studio executives are reading this, call me, I’d be happy to bang out a treatment.
Seriously, the book is great fun, and as Scott says it’s surprisingly readable. Not really a popularization; neither equations nor high-level abstractions are shied away from. (After months of jousting with the “grammar checker” in Microsoft Word, I now deploy sentence fragments and the passive voice out of sheer spite.) But put into the hands of the right ambitious high-school student, it could be life-changing.
p.s. You haven’t really lived until you’ve seen Cliff Taubes do his little dance to illustrate the concept of “quantum fluctuations.”
February 25th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
71 dollars!?! You bastard!
February 25th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Well, an advanced book on math from Princeton and recommended by working physicists is something worth checking out. Just looking at the table of contents sure looks interesting, but… I find that the “mathematical concepts” and the “problems and theorems” are ordered alphabetically!
And the biographies are not… they are ordered chronologically by year of birth! I’m not sure what you mean by “readable”. Anyways, if the biographies were in a separate second volume, and I could buy only the first one then, maybe…
February 25th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Just wondering. What was Microsoft Word used by you for?
February 25th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
Ah, money. That thing which can be exchanged for books. (And, sometimes, food.) I wonder if I could sell my old copy of the Feynman Lectures for a little cash — I got the new, four-volume “definitive edition” as a Christmas gift — and then turn that cash into book matter again. . .
February 25th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
This website is taking pitches for movie ideas, although it costs 10 bucks (but includes a year of subscription):
http://details.pitchnehst.com/pitches/how
Apparently if they like your plot, theyll film it.
That said i’d like to suggest I may already be living such a movie and would appreciate some minor credit, as I’m a poor junior college student who feels like he may never escape from such a plot. I also have some ideas about theoretical physics that I have not seen discussed and which explain the wave/particle duality of light, but havnt managed to single-handedly rewrite phsyics or even figured out how to finance a trip through the school systems to put me in position to have my voice heard. Also, Im seriously tired of the situations keeping me in this position, irritated at the priveleged and those who dont even try, and getting lazier by the minute.
February 26th, 2009 at 8:00 am
Supposing that is true…
what do you do then?!?!!
I need movie spoilers!
-NM
February 26th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
> p.s. You haven’t really lived until you’ve seen Cliff Taubes do his little dance to illustrate the concept of “quantum fluctuations.”
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=cliff+taubes+quantum+fluctuations&aq=f
gives
No videos found for “cliff taubes quantum fluctuations”
What gives?
February 27th, 2009 at 5:32 am
I’ve got the Princeton Companion. It’s fantastic. The quality of exposition is in general very high, and it’s extremely browsable. You learn mathematics just by owning it.
It’s also quite cheap for what it is: on amazon, 78 euros, 71 US dollars, or 35 pounds for over 1000 large pages. I’ve paid the same for mathematics books less than half the size.
February 28th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Herr Professor Doktor Stacey,
Please do give me a call.
March 30th, 2009 at 11:33 am
The PCM book indeed contains plenty of interesting stuff. To get a first impression before getting it, one can first look at the free samples from the publisher’s web site.