Download or read book Voltaire s Riddle written by Andrew J. Simoson and published by American Mathematical Soc.. This book was released on 2020-07-29 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Micromegas written by Voltaire and published by Newcomb Livraria Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new translation directly from the original French manuscript of Voltaire's 1752 Micromégas. This edition also contains supplemental material on Voltaire including an afterword by the translator, a timeline of Voltaire's life and works, summaries of each of the works in his corpus, and a glossary of Philosophic Terminology used by Voltaire. This is Voltaire's philosophical novel about giants from other planets who visit Earth and interact with its inhabitants. This is one of the first Science Fiction novels ever written, similar to The Day the Earth Stood Still or War of the Worlds. To two giant beings, one from Sirius and the other from Saturn, visit Earth and interact with humans. The extraordinary story is a satire on human vanity and the limitations of human knowledge and experience, and it reflects Voltaire's fascination with Newtonian science, planet formation and rational inquiry. The Saturnian and the Sirian find the philosophy of man to be laughable, but marvel and wonder at the genius of the philosophical Moths.
Download or read book Candide written by Voltaire and published by Hyweb Technology Co. Ltd.. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 690 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Voltaire s Riddle Microm gas and the Measure of All Things written by Andrew Simoson and published by American Mathematical Soc.. This book was released on 2010-12-31 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did you know that Voltaire was the first to publish the legend of Isaac Newton discovering gravity upon seeing an apple fall? That he tried for about eight years to be a mathematician? That in 1752 he wrote Micromégas, a story about a French expedition to the arctic (1736-7) whose purpose was to test Newton's controversial theories about gravity? This book is about that story and its underlying mathematics. In summary, an alien giant visits earth and encounters the expedition returning from north of the Baltic Sea. Their ensuing dialogue ranges from measurements of the very small to the very large, from gnats and microorganisms to planets and stars, from man's tendency to make war to dreams of understanding his own spirit. At the end of their conversation, the giant gives man a book with the answers to all things. But when they open it, it is blank. That is the riddle of this book. What does such an ending mean? As a series of vignettes and chapters, the author gives some riddle resolutions. The vignettes (requiring no special mathematics knowledge) describe the people, traditions, and events of the expedition and story. The chapters (accessible to anyone with a background in undergraduate linear algebra, vector calculus, and differential equations) show why a rotating earth must be flattened at the poles, why the tip of the earth's polar axis traces out a curve with period of nearly twenty-six thousand years, why the path of a small black hole dropped at the earth's equator must be a hypocycloid, why an old problem studied by Maupertuis (the leader of the French expedition) is a pursuit curve, and why in measuring phenomena we sometimes get it wrong. All in all, this book is a case study in how mathematical and scientific knowledge becomes common knowledge.
Download or read book Micromegas and Other Short Fictions written by Francois Voltaire and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2002-05-30 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Something between a tale and a polemic, these "fables of reason" are feats of narrative compression and contain much of Voltaire's best and funniest writing. From ribald tales of adultery to conversations between cosmic travellers, the stories in this collection pose moral, philosophical and social questions. Reader and protagonist alike find their assumptions challenged as Voltaire mingles rationality and fantasy.
Download or read book The Whole Prose Romances of Fran ois Marie Arouet de Voltaire Micromegas Candide or Optimism The world as it goes The white and the black Jeannot and Colin The history of the travels of Scarmentado The white bull Memnon or Human wisdom Plato s dream Bababec and the fakirs The two consoled ones written by Voltaire and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Portable Voltaire written by Voltaire and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1977-07-28 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes Part One of Candide; three stories; selections from The Philosophical Dictionary, The Lisbon Earthquake, and other works; and thirty-five letters.
Download or read book Too Like the Lightning written by Ada Palmer and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book of Terra Ignota, a four-book political SF epic set in a human future of extraordinary originality
Download or read book The Princess of Babylon written by Voltaire and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins written by Robert Paltock and published by . This book was released on 1884 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Candide and Other Stories written by Voltaire, and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-17 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The story of Candide, a naive youth who is conscripted, shipwrecked, robbed, and tortured by the Inquisition without losing his will to live, is accompanied by four other stories"--NoveList.
Download or read book Indefinite Pronouns written by Martin Haspelmath and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an encyclopaedic investigation of indefinite pronouns in the languages of the world. This book shows that the range of variation in the functional and formal properties of indefinite pronouns is subject to a set of universal implicational constraints, and proposes explanations for these universals.
Download or read book The History of Science Fiction written by A. Roberts and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-11-28 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The History of Science Fiction traces the origin and development of science fiction from Ancient Greece up to the present day. The author is both an academic literary critic and acclaimed creative writer of the genre. Written in lively, accessible prose it is specifically designed to bridge the worlds of academic criticism and SF fandom.
Download or read book The World in a Selfie written by Marco D'Eramo and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A spirited critique of the cultural politics of the tourist age. Or, why we are all tourists who hate tourists We've all been tourists at some point in our lives. How is it we look so condescendingly at people taking selfies in front of the Tower of Pisa? Is there really much to distinguish the package holiday from hipster city-breaks to Berlin or Brooklyn? Why do we engage our free time in an activity we profess to despise? The World in a Selfie dissects a global cultural phenomenon. For Marco D'Eramo, tourism is not just the most important industry of the century, generating huge waves of people and capital, calling forth a dedicated infrastructure, and upsetting and repurposing the architecture and topography of our cities. It also encapsulates the problem of modernity: the search for authenticity in a world of ersatz pleasures. D'Eramo retraces the grand tours of the first globetrotters - from Francis Bacon and Samuel Johnson to Arthur de Gobineau and Mark Twain - before assessing the cultural meaning of the beach holiday and the 'UNESCO-cide' of major heritage sites. The tourist selfie will never look the same again.
Download or read book Enlightenment Orientalism written by Srinivas Aravamudan and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel. More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies.
Download or read book City of Lions written by Jozef Wittlin and published by Pushkin Press. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A loving, sensuous, but also gently ironic reconstruction of a lost city” — LA Review of Books A timely reissue of the classic portrayal of the Ukrainian city of Lviv by 2 authors in 2 acts, separated by time and circumstance With an illuminating preface by Eva Hoffman and stunning new photographs by Diana Matar, City of Lions is a powerful and melancholy evocation of Ukraine in the twentieth century, with a special resonance for today. Lviv, Lwów, Lvov, Lemberg. Known by a variety of names, the City of Lions is now in western Ukraine. Situated in different countries during its history, it is a city located along the fault-lines of Europe's history. City of Lions presents two essays, written more than half a century apart - but united by one city. Józef Wittlin's lyrical paean to his Lwów, written in exile, is a deep cry of love and pain for his city, where most people he knew have fled or been killed. Philippe Sands' finely honed exploration of what has been lost and what remains interweaves a lawyer's love of evidence with the emotional heft of a descendant of Lviv.
Download or read book The Actual written by Saul Bellow and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-10-21 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The work of a great master still locked in unequal combat with Eros and Time.” –The New York Times Book Review A Penguin Classic In this dazzling work of fiction, Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow writes comically and wisely about the tenacious claims of first love. Harry Trellman, an aging, astute businessman, has never belonged anywhere and is as awkward in his human attachments as he is gifted in observing the people around him. But Harry's observational talents have not gone unnoticed by "trillionaire" Sigmund Adletsky, who retains Harry as his advisor. Soon the old man discovers Harry's intense forty-year passion for a twice-divorced interior designer, Amy Wustrin. At the exhumation and reburial of her husband, Harry is provided, thanks to Sigmund, perhaps the final means for disclosing feelings amassed over a lifetime. Written late in Bellow's career, The Actual is a maestro's dissection of the affairs of the heart. This Penguin Classics edition contains an introduction by Joseph O'Neill. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
