Indigenous scholar Richard van Camp of the Dogrib Nation shares how “a great story reminds us what it means to be human” (van in Galloway, 2020). Keith Devlin’s book, Finding Fibonacci: The Quest Rediscover Forgotten Mathematical Genius Who Changed World, does just that – reminding human, but this case through mathematics. In Fibonacci, Devlin his and journey learn more about mathematician Leon...

As the reader might appreciate after reading Fletcher's 1953 views, in 1918 Fletcher had taken on the toughest problem of all: to quantify and model how we hear and understand speech. This understanding allowed AT&T Bell Labs engineers to develop the necessary specifications of what was to become the largest telephone network in the world. The problems that Fletcher and his colleagues studied w...

So much has been written about the Great Unknown, so many people have visited Abbotsford, so many have, in the past, read the Waverley Novels, that one wonders that anyone could find it worth while to pen yet another account of the life of that painful genius, Sir Walter Scott, and it was with some trepidation that your reviewer opened this book, certain that so small a volume would be trite, o...

So much has been written about the Great Unknown, so many people have visited Abbotsford, so many have, in the past, read the Waverley Novels, that one wonders that anyone could find it worth while to pen yet another account of the life of that painful genius, Sir Walter Scott, and it was with some trepidation that your reviewer opened this book, certain that so small a volume would be trite, o...

There are relatively few stories of unrecognized genius at a late age in mathematics. The best-known story is that of Ramanujan, who developed his own way of thinking before his extraordinary gifts were spotted, after childhood, by Hardy. However Ramanujan was only 26 when he arrived in Cambridge. More usual is Gauss’s story, whose genius began to be appreciated in his early teens, and who fini...

Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is considered the most important Brazilian writer and a great universal literary figure. Little is know about his medical, personal and family history. He hid his "disease" as much as possible. Machado referred to "strange things" having happened to him in his childhood. He described seizures as "nervous phenomena", "absenses", "my illness". Laet observed a seizure ...

Clemens von Pirquet, his Life and Work, by RICHARD WAGNER, London, Oxford University Press, 1968, pp. xx, 214, illus., 66s. 6d. This fascinating biography should be read by every medical practitioner and many scientists. Its appearance is timely, for von Pirquet's pioneer work on allergy (the term he originated) has a bearing on the 'new immunology', including reactions (autoimmunization) invol...

Hippocrates, son of Heraclides, was born in 460 BC on the island of Kos (Greek island in the Aegean Sea), and died in 370 BC. He belonged to the guild of physicians called Asclepiadae, and his teachers were Herodicus and his father. Hippocrates taught in Greece, Persia, and Egypt. Hippocrates was not only a medical genius, but also a person who, in his passage through the world, shed a light th...