Rapidshare Links. The Signal[]DvDrip[Eng]. Strange Wilderness[]DvDrip[Eng]. Superhero Movie[]DvDrip[Eng]. Street Kings[]DvDrip[Eng].
Sin City[]DvDrip[Eng]. This comment has been removed by the author. December 3, at PM booster said Want to Read saving….
Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again.
Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Duels, battlefield heroism, secret societies, theft, imprisonment, and feuds fill the pages of A Strange Wilderness. Georg Cantor grappled with mental illness as he explored the highly counterintuitive, bizarre properties of infinite sets and numbers.
Emmy Noether struggled to find employment as she laid the mathematical groundwork for modern theoretical physics. And Alexander Grothendieck taught himself mathematics while interned in Nazi concentration camps, only to disappear into the Pyrenees at the zenith of his career. These are just a few stories recounted in this absorbing narrative.
In probing the lives of the preeminent mathematicians in history, a Strange Wilderness will leave you entertained and enlightened, with a newfound appreciation of the tenacity, complexity, and brilliance of the mathematical genius. Get A Copy. Hardcover , pages. More Details Other Editions 2.
Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about A Strange Wilderness , please sign up.
Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Jan 02, Kara Babcock rated it liked it Shelves: own , read , history , mathematics , non-fiction. On my last official day with my Grade 8 class, I did not want to teach them more about fractions. The cards I got back were all across the scale, from earnest to uninterested.
Quite a few were about pi. I decided to take the questions and weave them into a broader narrative about the use On my last official day with my Grade 8 class, I did not want to teach them more about fractions.
I decided to take the questions and weave them into a broader narrative about the use, purpose, and history of mathematics. I wanted to talk about how we figured out math and discuss some of the milestones in mathematical discovery. I decided that I should probably make at least one before I was finished my undergraduate degree.
Plus, my partner student teacher had the Grade 8s make their own prezis for a history project. So I made my first prezi to talk to Grade 8s about math. Part of my goal as a teacher is to expose my students to the wider world of mathematics, to impress upon them that math is more than just skills and concepts they learn out of a textbook in the fulfilment of curriculum expectations.
I want to make the usefulness and purpose of all that math explicit—and I want to go even further and show that math can be beautiful. Because the history of mathematics—and the lives of those caught up in it—is intensely fascinating. Or at least I find it so. Stories of love, betrayal, comedy, and tragedy pervade story of math.
Because doing math is ultimately an act of discovery and of creativity—and those acts are what make us human. Amir D. Aczel recognizes this in A Strange Wilderness , which is a history of mathematics disguised as a biography of mathematicians. Lucky for me, my Grade 8s had not heard the Eureka! So I got to tell it to them for the first time! This is a laudable goal, and one that coincides with my own. Mathematical concepts just exist, passed down to us by the teacher and the textbook.
These people were all living, breathing individuals at some point in history, with the same mundane concerns as any human being. For reason, though, through a combination of genius and effort and luck, they made a lasting contribution to our wealth of knowledge as a species.
Aczel brings a wealth of knowledge and enthusiasm to this endeavour. I discovered a lot of cool things about names I already knew, and I met a few fresh faces as well. I marvelled at the chain of events that led to people like Isaac Newton becoming the juggernauts of their day.
It was only through the intervention of his uncle that he returned to finish his education and end up at Cambridge. I shudder to imagine how history would have played out differently if Newton had stayed on a farm! Aczel seems to do his best to hit the high notes. That being said, he makes some curious decisions about who to leave out. Certainly he focuses less on the math itself and more on the mathematicians, as is the case with the final mathematician, the reclusive Alexander Grothendieck.
Whatever the reason, as much as I enjoyed A Strange Wilderness in small doses, it took me longer to read than I expected. In combination with other resources, for it is certainly not exhaustive, A Strange Wilderness is a fine book on the history of mathematics.
Aczel will often discuss the details of the mathematics that his featured geniuses discovered. The math in this math book consists mostly of shout-outs, an understanding of which is far from essential for enjoying this book. As usual, it comes down to what you want out of your mathematics book. Mar 12, Bryan Higgs rated it liked it Shelves: history-mathematics , mathematics.
Ordinarily, I like such books, and have read quite a few of them. However, I found this one a little on the lifeless side -- too much a short description of facts which left me not much impressed. I've read quite a few books on the history of mathematics both specific and general that were much better than this one, so I'm trying to figure out what the difference was.
Here are my conclusions: 1 The descriptions were a little too cold and purely informative to me. They didn't have much life to Ordinarily, I like such books, and have read quite a few of them. They didn't have much life to them. Some of the other reviews said that they couldn't follow the math, which surprised me because what was covered was pretty elementary, and lacked detail.
Call me a shrink, pronto! Anyway, for a lazy bum, he sure can navigate that remote control fridge by seeing through walls unless that remote has some type of radar or something. That gadget is called The RC Cooler. Thomas from Brotherhood of Bears had shared that awesome contest entry for an amateur video commercial for Heinz Ketchup where a group of biker bears break into a Broadway-like song and dance.
I actually found the background dialog more amusing than the actual face slapping:. Thanks, Luis! Or you can also download that episode from this link:. I finally found the photos of Drew Powell that were shared in the old BearMythology Yahoo Group… At the time, none of us knew who this cute bear was. Eventually, I had given up. And, lo and behold, a Jack In The Box commercial popped up, I posted it, and someone finally revealed to us his real name.
Anyway, back to the original subject of utmost importance. Just look at those fuzzy screenshots. How wrong was I! Needless to say, I became a believer…. It was there all along! Yes, your honor.
There is definitely no disputing anymore. Case is closed. And perhaps the loss of accommodations where no flyscreens and a synthetic mattress wrapped in thick brown vinyl represents the best that can be expected of comfort — a near-unbearable arrangement in summer, when you lie awake for hours listening to mosquitos whine about your head, and then peel yourself off in a morning lather of sweat, knowing that an ocean swim is the only way to feeling human again — is not much of a loss at all.
The Triffids had arrived there in , at the end of a northern summer, and almost exactly a year later they began recording their album. The Triffids must have missed the light, during their many seasons away from home. Everyone who leaves Australia does. Where were you? Born Sandy Devotional is a great album title. It might have been called Greetings From Mandurah, W.
But Born Sandy Devotional has an added poetry, a concentration of meaning that draws you back to it, wondering, about how sand and devotion and birthplace might fit together. I came late to The Triffids, intrigued by that title and by the cover art, which occasionally glanced out at me from racks of second-hand LPs, long before I could come to terms with the music. Countless bands have toiled and died in this middlebrow wilderness, and I thought that The Triffids were one of them, only partially redeemed by their long-standing historical and critical association with the infinitely cooler Nick Cave.
This early misunderstanding is partly a consequence of my age: I had my adolescence during the s, when it could be argued that Australian music was less enamoured of its immediate pre-history than ever before.
Grant McLennan tried too hard and The Go-Betweens were effete, like David McComb and The Triffids; Nick Cave was exempt thanks to the cachet of his well-documented heroin addiction, which fit the opiated tenor of the times — no matter that both McLennan and McComb had their own, less publicised struggles with the same drug.
Plus, the yawping nightmare blues of The Birthday Party could still shock your parents, whereas they might be passingly familiar with The Go Betweens or The Triffids. Such assumptions and cultural prejudices are of course unfair; unfair to the The Triffids, who were in fact very young when they relocated to London. But then, perhaps you have to be very young to want to sound as old as The Triffids do on this record, desperate and exhausted, at the end of their tethers.
At twenty-three it is important to love without moderation, to live as if you will never be able to redeem yourself and with the firm conviction that you will never care to do so. I put the record on and then listened to it back-to-back at least twenty times in two days.
I finally got it, suddenly and completely. The patina of critical appreciation surrounding them is partly what makes The Triffids difficult to approach, though perhaps less so if, like me, you were born too young to have much immediate investment in their mythology.
Listeners of my generation have to make an effort to seek them out: though they are embedded in the Australian musical consciousness The Triffids have never been fashionable or popular in their own country; few artists sound anything like them and equally few will admit to them as an influence. The assertion is true: Born Sandy Devotional is a great Australian album, though glibly stating this is hardly enough to make it true.
Why is it remarkable, and what can it still say about Australia nearly a quarter of a century — sobering calculation! If it were simply a warm homage to seaside provincialism it would be much less interesting than it is, but Born Sandy Devotional is affecting for the way in which the Australian landscape becomes strange again through the songs.
Unlike the mystical utopianism that colours American depictions of the frontier, combining a sense of divine purpose with the conviction that the continent will, in the end, provide for all those who seek its bounty, Australians are scared of the huge space they inhabit. I say subconscious because this estrangement rarely reaches the level of conscious articulation — rarely, because to do so would involve an acknowledgement of the horrific violence that has shaped Australian colonisation, an acknowledgement that, historically, we have been very poor at making.
The legal fiction on which Australia was founded — Terra nullius, empty land — might have been officially overturned in , but the violence it took to sustain, both literal and philosophical, had done irreversible harm. Both lacked the emotional and musical grandeur of which The Triffids were more than capable, and which reaches its apex on Born Sandy Devotional.
God knows how many such deaths occur across Australia year in and year out: cars on deserted roads that have been driven inexplicably into rivers or bent around tree trunks. The privacy to destroy oneself in rural isolation is a perverse benefit of having so many roads for so few people.
The Triffids never denied it themselves. He would have been a happier man, one gets the impression, had he been raised in New Orleans, Berlin or Paris — anywhere more exotic than plain old Melbourne. Nick Cave has never been obliged to do similar, but his towering influence over Australian music has brought increasingly diminishing returns, as young bands persist in imitating his signifiers of lates Berlin decadence at nearly three decades remove from their original context.
The Triffids, on the other hand, have a musicianship that the Bad Seeds have always struggled to approach, and David McComb is a forceful, emotive singer.
Musicianship can kill a song stone dead when a too-tasteful execution trumps feeling, but in this case their discipline as a band — achieved through countless live performances — keeps The Triffids on a leash of just the right tension. They snap and release, limbering up for the first minute or so before tightening into an emphatic rhythmic thump, and then ploughing on through the final section with increasing speed and frenzy: cymbals crashing, McComb calling down the heavens, the melodic instruments veering off into an atonal screech like metal grinding on metal as a nasty, nasty car accident looms up in the front windscreen.
Across the endless flat, your mind plays tricks on you: something appears in the headlights, or does it? It flickers and then vanishes again. What makes men and women send their cars crashing into trees and off of bridges? A broken heart can drive you to terrible things, which become more terrible in a depopulated landscape, where no decision can be redeemed or reversed by another human being. There is only the land, which offers no comfort; which for all its space begins to close down upon you, just like the music, its cavernous dimensions become claustrophobic, as if the entire thing was a thunderstorm happening inside your own head.
Treeless Plain is by no means a bad record, but it does occasionally lapse into country-rock plod. Like Born Sandy Devotional, Nebraska is a great road album, and it retains a sizeable cult following among Australian bands with hundreds of kilometres to travel between shows: the ultimate downer soundtrack for the long drive across state borders while battling a morning hangover.
Springsteen too is interested in what happens when people take their demons and their miseries out onto the road, across the desolate badlands of America where dreams of freedom and opportunity for all have gone very sour. It depends on whether or not you think that writing a chart-topper is a blessing. Wide open There exists a piece of footage filmed on January 10th, , when during a brief return home The Triffids played on the bill of the Australian Made tour, a summer festival with stadium-lite rockers INXS headlining.
An opening helicopter shot gives a glimpse of Perth: the Swan River, the Indian Ocean, that blue sky and the parched summer paddocks surrounding Subiaco Oval, more commonly home to Australian Rules football matches. In a stripy blue-and-white neckerchief, a collared white shirt, black trousers and sparkling gold waistcoat he still looks ineffably cool, which means that in he probably looked like an alien.
Perfect pop songs come to most artists only once, if they come at all; what is remarkable is that within three years of each other two Australian bands, exiled to London for want of any decent audience back home, playing chaotic tennis matches with each other in between recording sessions, could have both written songs that still remain so perfect, absolutely undiminished no matter how many times you encounter them.
What is more, that both songs are landmarks of distinctly Australian writing — songs that take on, in music and words, the task of conveying what it feels like to live here. Where is home?
0コメント