Santiago Ramon y Cajal was a mythic figure in science. Hailed as the father of modern anatomy and neurobiology, he was largely responsible for the modern conception of the brain. His groundbreaking works were New Ideas on the Structure of the Nervous System and Histology of the Nervous System in Man and Vertebrates. In addition to leaving a legacy of unparalleled scientific research, Cajal sought to educate the novice scientist about how science was done and how he thought it should be done. This recently rediscovered classic, first published in 1897, is an anecdotal guide for the perplexed new investigator as well as a refreshing resource for the old pro.
Cajal was a pragmatist, aware of the pitfalls of being too idealistic -- and he had a sense of humor, particularly evident in his diagnoses of various stereotypes of eccentric scientists. The book covers everything from valuable personality traits for an investigator to social factors conducive to scientific work.
--from amazon

One of the great social thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Sir Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) enjoyed a career of astonishing diversity. This new analysis of his life and work reviews his ideas and philosophy of planning, providing a scholarly yet accessible account for those interested in the history of planning, urban design, social theory and nineteenth century British history.

杨振宁教授在出版他的两册《杨振宁论文选集（1945-1980）》和《杨振宁论文选集Ⅱ》中为选出的每篇文章都写了一篇后记。这些后记是极为重要的史料，本书这些文章的结集。这些文章对20世纪物理学历史有非常重要的价值；而且对于了解和研究杨振宁教授对物理学的贡献、他的科学思想、品位、风格，以及个人某些情感经历，也具有十分重要的意义。
各篇后记主要是追寻我个人作为一个物理学家的发展过程，同时清理一下我从当研究生以来的兴趣和想法。本书并不是我对自己研究工作的评价。科学家不希望对自己所有的论文作面面俱到的评价，但最懂得自己每一篇文章故事的，莫过于作者本人。——杨振宁
一方面，您对近代物理发展的历史，作了明晰有条理的简介；同时，您把最近的过去，心头不如意事也坦白地布开，使人读了非常感动。——吴健雄
他巧妙地将八十页后记结集一起放在书的开始部分，而不是附在各篇文章的后面。这样，后记可以连续地读，成了他的科学自传，一部极好的自传。它以清楚而简练的词句描述了他的一生，朴实地描述了他工作背后的强烈感情和始终不渝的忠诚。换言之，它描述了杨振宁之所以成为杨振宁。——弗里曼·戴森

This is the definitive edition of the hugely popular collection of Einstein quotations that has sold tens of thousands of copies worldwide and been translated into twenty-five languages.
The Ultimate Quotable Einstein features roughly 1,600 quotes in all. This paperback edition includes sections unique to the ultimate collection--"On and to Children," "On Race and Prejudice," and "Einstein’s Verses: A Small Selection"--as well as a chronology of Einstein’s life and accomplishments, Freeman Dyson’s authoritative foreword, and commentary and descriptive source notes by Alice Calaprice.

《数学与数学人》是一套国际化的科学普及丛书，我们将邀请当代一流的中外科学家谈他们的数学人生——研究经历和成功经验。活跃在研究前沿的数学家们将会用轻松的文笔，通俗地介绍数学各领域激动人心的最新进展、某些数学专题精彩曲折的发展历史以及数学在现代科学技术中的广泛应用。

A remarkable personal and professional chronicle by one of today's leading physicists, this is a collection of Chen Ning Yang's personally selected papers supplemented by his insightful commentaries. Including previously unpublished or hard-to-find works, this volume contains Yang's important papers on statistical physics, nuclear forces, and particle physics. Among them are his seminal work with T D Lee on the nonconservation of parity, for which they won the Nobel Prize, and his work with R L Mills, which led to modern gauge theories with their exciting prospects for the broad unification of field theories. The commentaries were written especially for this volume and provide a fascinating account of Yang's development as a physicist as well as a look at many important physicists of the 20th century. They trace the development of Yang's interests and ideas from his graduate school days to the present, showing how he worked with his colleagues and how their physics came into being. Together, the papers and commentaries in this unique collection comprise a powerful personal statement, shedding light on both the intellectual development of a great physicist and on the nature of scientific inquiry.

In this visionary look into the future, Freeman Dyson argues that technological changes fundamentally alter our ethical and social arrangements and that three rapidly advancing new technologies — solar energy, genetic engineering, and worldwide communication — together have the potential to create a more equal distribution of the world's wealth.
Dyson begins by rejecting the idea that scientific revolutions are primarily concept driven. He shows rather that new tools are more often the sparks that ignite scientific discovery. Such tool-driven revolutions have profound social consequences: the invention of the telescope turning the medieval view of the world upside down, the widespread use of household appliances in the 1950s replacing servants, to cite just two examples. In looking ahead, Dyson suggests that solar energy, genetics, and the Internet will have similarly transformative effects, with the potential to produce a more just and equitable society. Solar power could bring electricity to even the poorest, most remote areas of third-world nations, allowing everyone access to the vast stores of information on the Internet and effectively ending the cultural isolation of the poorest countries. Similarly, breakthroughs in genetics may well enable us to give our children healthier lives and grow more efficient crops, thus restoring the economic and human vitality of village cultures devalued and dislocated by the global market.
Written with passionate conviction about the ethical uses of science, The Sun, The Genome, and The Internet is both a brilliant reinterpretation of the scientific process and a challenge to use new technologies to close, rather than widen, the gap between rich and poor.

"It presents a sensitive portrait of a great human being. It describes accurately and intelligibly on a nontechnical level the world of mathematical ideas in which Hilbert created his masterpieces. And it illuminates the background of German social history against which the drama of Hilberts life was played. Beyond this, it is a poem in praise of mathematics." -SCIENCE

Based on a National Magazine Award-winning article, this masterful biography of Hungarian-born Paul Erdos is both a vivid portrait of an eccentric genius and a layman's guide to some of this century's most startling mathematical discoveries.

From Galileo to today’s amateur astronomers, scientists have been rebels, writes Freeman J. Dyson. Like artists and poets, they are free spirits who resist the restrictions their cultures impose on them. In their pursuit of nature’s truths, they are guided as much by imagination as by reason, and their greatest theories have the uniqueness and beauty of great works of art.Dyson argues that the best way to understand science is by understanding those who practice it. He tells stories of scientists at work, ranging from Isaac Newton’s absorption in physics, alchemy, theology, and politics, to Ernest Rutherford’s discovery of the structure of the atom, to Albert Einstein’s stubborn hostility to the idea of black holes. His descriptions of brilliant physicists like Edward Teller and Richard Feynman are enlivened by his own reminiscences of them. He looks with a skeptical eye at fashionable scientific fads and fantasies, and speculates on the future of climate prediction, genetic engineering, the colonization of space, and the possibility that paranormal phenomena may exist yet not be scientifically verifiable.Dyson also looks beyond particular scientific questions to reflect on broader philosophical issues, such as the limits of reductionism, the morality of strategic bombing and nuclear weapons, the preservation of the environment, and the relationship between science and religion. These essays, by a distinguished physicist who is also a prolific writer, offer informed insights into the history of science and fresh perspectives on contentious current debates about science, ethics, and faith.

This textbook fills a gap in the existing literature on general relativity by providing the advanced student with practical tools for the computation of many physically interesting quantities. The context is provided by the mathematical theory of black holes, one of the most successful and relevant applications of general relativity. Topics covered include congruences of timelike and null geodesics, the embedding of spacelike, timelike and null hypersurfaces in spacetime, and the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of general relativity.