Kitty Ferguson

Acclaimed popular science writer Kitty Ferguson investigates little-explored byroads in the history of science, from Johannes Kepler's nearly disastrous venture into the realm of science fiction to a mid-twentieth-century experiment involving EEGs and rocket fuel. She introduces such underappreciated geniuses as Mary the Jewess, the first-century ancestress of modern chemistry; and Lise Meitner, who escaped Nazi Germany only to have her role in the...

"Pythagoras's influence on the ideas, and therefore on the destiny, of the human race was probably greater than that of any single man before or after him," wrote Arthur Koestler. Though most people know of him only for the famous Pythagorean Theorem (a2 +b2=c2), in fact the pillars of our scientific tradition--belief that the universe is rational, that there is unity to all things, and that numbers and mathematics are a powerful guide to truth about...