510 results for "Science"

The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

David Leavitt
A "skillful and literate" ( New York Times Book Review ) biography of the persecuted genius who helped create the modern computer. To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating "treatment" that may have led to his suicide. With a novelist's sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity?his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor?and elegantly explains his work and its implications.
W. W. Norton & Company 2006-11-17 336 pages

Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and symbol

Trachtenberg, Alan
Fourteen of Walker Evans's evocative photographs of Brooklyn Bridge, most of which have never been published, appear in this edition of Alan Trachenberg's Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol. In the new afterword Trachenberg explores the history of Hart Crane's The Bridge, especially the poem's integral relationship with the powerful photography of Evans."[Brooklyn Bridge] is familiar in so many movies, in so many stage sets and, as Mr. Trachtenberg shows in this brilliant . . . book, it is at least as much a symbol as a reality. . . . Mr. Trachtenberg is always exciting and illuminating."—Times Literary Supplement "The book is a skillful and insightful synthesis of materials about Brooklyn Bridge from such diverse fields as history, engineering, literature and art. Essentially it asks the question of why Brooklyn Bridge achieved such great impact on the nineteenth century American imagination and why it has continued to have a significant impact on twentieth century art and literature. In addition to its exploration of the bridge's symbolic significance, which includes perceptive analyses of such particular works as Hart Crane's great poem cycle and the paintings of artists like Joseph Stella, the book also includes a solidly researched account of the conception, planning and construction of the bridge. Trachtenberg's account of the intellectual and cultural sources of the bridge is particularly fascinating in its demonstration of the convergence of many different philosophical and ideological currents of the time around this great engineering enterprise, illustrating as effectively as any discussion I know the complex interplay of ideas and material culture."—John G. Cawelti, University of Chicago"Alan Trachtenberg's Brooklyn Bridge is a fascinating story, the philosophic genesis of the idea in Europe, John Roebling's heroic effort to translate it into masonry and steel, and the meanings that Americans attached to the physical object as an emblem of their aspirations."—Leo Marx, Amherst College, author of The Machine in the Garden
Oxford University Press 1965 192 pages

The human test: how predictability, creativity, and the quantum mind will redefine life in the age of AI

Folman, Ron
"As data harvesting continues its exponential growth and computing power increases beyond what we can even imagine, AI and Big Data will be able to predict what we want for breakfast, what shoes we will buy, which political party we will vote for, and who we will fancy in a bar. Indeed, these deep-learning machines will know us better than we know ourselves. The day awaits when academia and big business will be able to quantify just how predictable each of us are. If indeed we are predictable like machines, to what extent are we alive, and under what definition? In The Human Test, quantum physicist Ron Folman unites findings from cognitive science, quantum physics, philosophy, and technology to offer a prescient look into this startling new era of human existence. If we are indeed found to be predictable, it will change everything we thought we knew about human nature. The Human Test strives for a new paradigm, and this new paradigm is found in human predictability. Existing monitors of general brain activity measure only very rudimentary aspects of the human experience, or what may be called human life; could the advent of a disruptive new technology bring about a much more insightful measure of who we are? While The Human Test describes a new and profound near-future impact of AI, it is rooted in a topic of paramount importance to humans: the enigma of consciousness and how it defines human life-or, what differentiates humans from all other life forms. Ultimately, The Human Test addresses some of the most fundamental questions about our species, starting with the most crucial: do we have free will, or are we merely machines? Fortunately, there is an antidote to predictability: creativity, that wondrous state of being original and inherently not predictable. Ultimately, Folman argues that if we can understand predictability, we can learn how to distance ourselves from it, and transcend to a purer idea of what human life should look like"-- Provided by publisher.
Prometheus 2025-03-25 267 pages

Biology under the influence: dialectical essays on ecology, agriculture, and health

Lewontin, Richard C.
How do we understand the world? While some look to the heavens for intelligent design, others argue that it is determined by information encoded in DNA. Science serves as an important activity for uncovering the processes and operations of nature, but it is also immersed in a social context where ideology influences the questions we ask and how we approach the material world. Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society breaks from the confirms of determinism, offering a dialectical analysis for comprehending a dynamic social and natural world. In Biology Under the Influence , Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins provide a devastating critique of genetic determinism and reductionism within science while exploring a broad range of issues including the nature of science, biology, evolution, the environment, pubic health, and dialectics, They dismantle the ideology that attempts to naturalize social inequalities, unveil the alienation of science and nature, and illustrate how a dialectical position serves as a basis for grappling with historical developments and a world characterized by change. Biology Under the Influence brings together the illuminating essays of two prominent scientists who work to demystify and empower the public's understanding of science and nature.
Monthly Review Press 2007-11-01 400 pages

What's left: three paths through the planetary crisis

Harris, Malcolm
"Climate change is the unifying crisis of our time. But the scale of the problem can be paralyzing, especially when corporations are actively staving off changes that could save the planet but which might threaten their bottom lines. To quote Greta Thunberg, despite very clear science and very real devastation, the adults at the table are still saying "blah blah blah." Something has to change--but what, and how? In What's Left, Malcolm Harris cuts through the noise and gets real about our remaining options for saving the world. Just as humans have caused climate change, we hold the power to avert a climate apocalypse, but that will only happen through collective political action. Harris outlines the three strategies--progressive, socialist, and revolutionary--that have any chance of succeeding, while also revealing that none of them can succeed on their own. What's Left shows how we must combine them into a single pathway: a meta-strategy, one that will ensure we can move forward together rather than squabbling over potential solutions while the world burns." -- Provided by publisher.
Little, Brown and Company 2025-04-15 310 pages

Diamond Design

Marcel From Old Catalog Tolkowsky
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Creative Media Partners, LLC 2022-10-26 112 pages

Theory of Finite and Infinite Graphs

König, Denes
To most graph theorists there are two outstanding landmarks in the history of their subject. One is Euler's solution of the Konigsberg Bridges Problem, dated 1736, and the other is the appearance of Denes Konig's textbook in 1936. "From Konigsberg to Konig's book" sings the poetess, "So runs the graphic tale . . . " [10]. There were earlier books that took note of graph theory. Veb len's Analysis Situs, published in 1931, is about general combinato rial topology. But its first two chapters, on "Linear graphs" and "Two-Dimensional Complexes," are almost exclusively concerned with the territory still explored by graph theorists. Rouse Ball's Mathematical Recreations and Essays told, usually without proofs, of the major graph-theoretical advances ofthe nineteenth century, of the Five Colour Theorem, of Petersen's Theorem on I-factors, and of Cayley's enumerations of trees. It was Rouse Ball's book that kindled my own graph-theoretical enthusiasm. The graph-theoretical papers of Hassler Whitney, published in 1931-1933, would have made an excellent textbook in English had they been collected and published as such. But the honour of presenting Graph Theory to the mathe matical world as a subject in its own right, with its own textbook, belongs to Denes Konig. Low was the prestige of Graph Theory in the Dirty Thirties. It is still remembered, with resentment now shading into amuse ment, how one mathematician scorned it as "The slums of Topol ogy.""
Birkhäuser 2012-10-18 436 pages