Biographies About
Brilliant Mathematicians & Physicists

Discover the secrets, breakthroughs, and master calculations of those who
took on complex problems and changed the course of history.

Asked to name a great physicist, most people would mention Newton or Einstein, Feynman or Hawking. But ask a physicist and there’s no doubt that James Clerk Maxwell will be near the top of the list. Maxwell was an unassuming Victorian Scotsman....

NATIONAL BESTSELLER NPR Best Book of 2017 “Not all superheroes wear capes, and Elizebeth Smith Friedman should be the subject of a future Wonder Woman movie.”— The New York Times Joining the ranks of Hidden Figures and In the Garden of Beasts, the incredible true story of the greatest...

In March 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with ­million-dollar stakes. At the card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT. With him was Ken...

From Jim Holt, New York Times best-selling author of Why Does the World Exist?, comes When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought, an entertaining and accessible audiobook guide to the most profound scientific and mathematical ideas of recent centuries Does time exist?...

In How the Laser Happened, Nobel laureate Charles Townes provides a highly personal look at some of the leading events in 20th-century physics....

The irresistibly engaging book that "enlarges one's wonder at Tammet's mind and his all-embracing vision of the world as grounded in numbers" (Oliver Sacks, MD). Thinking in Numbers is the book that Daniel Tammet, mathematical savant and bestselling author, was born to write. In Tammet's world...

When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is...

From the end of the 19th century until his death, one of history's most brilliant mathematicians languished in an asylum. The Mystery of the Aleph tells the story of Georg Cantor (1845-1918), a Russian-born German who created set theory, the concept of infinite numbers, and the "continuum...

To his colleagues, Richard Feynman was not so much a genius as he was a full-blown magician: someone who “does things that nobody else could do and that seem completely unexpected.” The path he cleared for twentieth-century physics led from the making of the atomic bomb to a Nobel...

Enrico Fermi is unquestionably among the greats of the world's physicists, the most famous Italian scientist since Galileo....

A powerful defense of intellectual freedom told through the ordeals of contemporary scientists attacked for exploring controversial ideas, by a noted science historian....

Augustin Fresnel (1788–1827) shocked the scientific elite with his unique understanding of the physics of light. The lens he invented was a brilliant feat of engineering....

This is the untold story of an eccentric Wall Street tycoon and the circle of scientific geniuses he assembled before World War II to develop the science for radar and the atomic bomb. Together they changed the course of history....

Harvard geometer and Fields medalist Shing-Tung Yau has provided a mathematical foundation for string theory, offered new insights into black holes, and mathematically demonstrated the stability of our universe. In this autobiography, Yau reflects on his improbable journey....

Hubble's discoveries changed our knowledge of our place in the universe forever. His determination that the universe is expanding served as the foundation for the big bang theory....

One of the most famous intellectuals to hail from Denmark is Niels Bohr, a world-famous physicist and one of the patriarchs of quantum theory. Given the peaceful haven that is Denmark today, it’s somewhat ironic that Bohr played an instrumental role in the development of the atomic bomb...

Galileo Galilei was the foremost scientist of his day. Though he never left Italy, his inventions and discoveries were heralded around the world. His telescopes allowed him to reveal the heavens and enforce the astounding argument that the earth moves around the sun. For this belief, he was...