Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. August 29, 1809 – October 7, 1894) was an American physician, poet, and polymath based in Boston. A member of the Fireside Poets, he was acclaimed by his peers as one of the
German scientist and man of letters Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was an 18th-century polymath: an experimental physicist, an astronomer, a mathematician, a practicing critic both of art and literature.
From brilliant young polymath Andrew Rader - an MIT-credentialled scientist, popular podcast host and SpaceX mission manager - an illuminating chronicle of exploration that spotlights humans' insatiab
From the author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Gene, a #1 New York Times bestseller, comes his most spectacular book yet, an exploration of medicine and our radical new ability to manipulate cells. Rich with Mukherjee’s revelatory and exhilarating stories of scientists, doctors, and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, The Song of the Cell is the third book in this extraordinary writer’s exploration of what it means to be human.Mukherjee begins this magnificent story in the late 1600s, when a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked down their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two sciences, and altering both forever. It was the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiolo
If the starting point for a number of poems in Ian Duhig's richly varied new collection is Sterne'sTristram Shandy, its presiding genius is the great 18th-century civil engineer, fiddler and polymath
Julia Kristeva is a true polymath, an intellectual of astonishingly wide range whose erudition and insight have been brought to bear on psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural
The work of seventeenth-century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz has proved inspirational to philosophers and scientists alike. In this thought-provoking book, Pauline Phemister explores the ecologi
In this thought-provoking book, Pauline Phemister sketches an ecological philosophy based on the systematic philosophy of seventeenth century polymath, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.Leibniz’s pluralist me
The Serbian Bogdan Bogdanovic (1922?2010)? architect, urbanist, polymath, writer, and former mayor of Belgrade?created some of the most distinctive memorials in Europe. In particular his ?Flower of St
These are the reflections of a nonagenarian polymath describing the shift from a fifty-year-long career as a world-famous chemist to a subsequent twenty-five-year immersion in “science-in-fiction” and
These are the reflections of a nonagenarian polymath describing the shift from a fifty-year-long career as a world-famous chemist to a subsequent twenty-five-year immersion in “science-in-fiction” and
"From prolific polymath Clifford Pickover-the ingenious author of The Math Book and The Physics Book-comes a stunning and inspirational volume that celebrates the beauty and wisdom of mathematics. Cli
The long awaited volume from Satoshi Nakamoto, renowned polymath and creator of Bitcoin is finally here! Printed on a brilliant white paper, The Official Bitcoin Coloring Book* is packed with unique,
The life of brilliant polymath Kenneth Clark - director of the National Gallery, author, patron of the arts, social lion, who in 1969, achieved international acclaim as the writer, producer, and prese
The German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is often seen as the quintessential eighteenth-century tourist, though with the exception of a trip to Italy he hardly left his homeland. Compared to sev
In the third century CE, the North African polymath, soldier, and provincial official Q. Gargilius Martialis (died 260) wrote a treatise on the cultivation and medical use of fruits, vegetables, and herbs. The agricultural part of this work survives in a fragmentary state in a single manuscript. Despite this impediment, the agricultural writings are noteworthy for the clear marks both of their meticulous research and of the application of independent judgement and experience. Gargilius furthermore presents his advice in a stylized and literary form that strives for elegance through the use of prose rhythm, rhetorical variatio, and figurative language. The fragments will be valuable for those interested in ancient agriculture, in Greco-Roman authorship on the technai or artes, and in the history and sociolinguistics of Latin. This volume offers a new edition and the first English translation of Gargilius' agricultural fragments as well as an introduction and full-scale commentary.
In times of widespread Islamophobia, there is an understandable motivation for constructing scientific achievement as a counternarrative in popular discourse about Islam. Yet doing so has tended to impose an anachronistic conception of "science" onto pre-modern practices while also obscuring wider views of the intellectual, philosophical, and particularly the material context of medieval scientific achievement. An exemplary case study for this phenomenon is the figure of 'Abbas Ibn Firnas (d. 887), a celebrated early scientist, C鏎doban courtier, and polymath. Ibn Firnas is best known today for conducting an early aeronautics experiment, which was commemorated by NASA. Some historians have called it the first successful human flight. The earliest and fullest account of Ibn Firnas' career in the Umayyad court includes the aeronautics experiment, and a great deal more on his achievements in the arts and design but has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. That account, aspreserved
Originally published in 1929, this book contains an English translation of the Berlin-era memoirs of Russian diplomat Peter Alexandrovich Saburov (1835–1918). The memoirs relate to the period 1879–84, covering Saburov's central involvement in the negotiations surrounding The League of the Three Emperors. This diplomatic alignment between Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia was of fundamental importance to the international life of Europe during the late nineteenth century. The text was translated by British diplomat and renowned polymath thinker James Young Simpson (1873–1934). This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in European and Russian history.
