David Guaspari

One hundred years ago, she united symmetry and conservation in physics.

Euler’s identity: Genius, discovery, elegance.

The generic, everyday name is “bear can.” The original model of the bear-resistant food container, pioneered by Garcia Machine Inc., is a black cylinder with countersunk lid, unsmashable, too large to be carried off in a bear’s mouth, with a blank surface that offers no purchase for paws or claws.…

Narsarsuaq, Greenland

Narsarsuaq, Greenland

I can't remember not being a mediocre piano player, though there must have been a time when I was worse. I wasn't born vamping through the easy movements of Best Loved Classics and burying their tricky parts in clouds of pedal. (Take that, Moonlight Sonata!) No, my kind of musician is made—by going…

I can’t remember not being a mediocre piano player, though there must have been a time when I was worse. I wasn't born vamping through the easy movements of Best Loved Classics and burying their tricky parts in clouds of pedal. (Take that, Moonlight Sonata!) No, my kind of musician is made—by going…

This is an unusual biography of a highly unusual man, the prodigiously gifted mathematician and professional eccentric John Horton Conway—creative scientist, teacher, showman, and cult figure. His third ex-wife told the author, Siobhan Roberts, that he was both “the most interesting person I have…

The short plane ride from Kathmandu to Lukla, through the front range of the Himalayas, is famous not just for scenery but for thrills. The tricky part is landing, at which the pilot gets one shot: Skim over a pass, bank, and drop sharply onto a short runway sloped upward at nearly 10 degrees to…

"What is it like,” asks Tim Birkhead, “for an emperor penguin diving in the inky blackness of the Antarctic seas at depths of up to 400 m[eters]?” And what is it like “to feel a sudden urge to eat incessantly, and over a week or so become hugely obese, then fly relentlessly—pulled by some invisible…

Many ancient societies knew important mathematical facts, but only one discovered mathematics—which is not a collection of accurate rules of thumb, but a body of knowledge organized deductively, by the radical notion of proof. And Euclid is its prophet. 

Damn Yankees is a bathroom book, which I mean in the nicest way: short, generally entertaining, with essays from authors often better known as writers than as sportswriters. Most would engage a nonfan and none presupposes warm feelings for the Yankee imperium.  

Humor plays an extraordinary role in everyday life. The traditional Martian observer might marvel at our craving for the incapacitating, nonproductive seizures known as laughter. Many major philosophers have proposed an account of it—an expression of superiority (Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes), the…

Superheroes: The Best of Philosophy and Pop Culture expounds Immanuel Kant’s defense of retribution as a duty intimately related to “respect, honor, and what it means to be a valuable person living a worthwhile life in a community of other moral persons. When,” on the other hand, “Rorschach…

Ithaca, N.Y.

It’s What’s Inside the Lines That Counts

Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego

Is God a Mathematician?

The Unfinished Game

Aristotle and an Aardvark Go to Washington

The Best of All Possible Worlds

Symmetry

The Pythagorean Theorem

The Backwash Squeeze and Other Improbable Feats

Symmetry and the Monster

Incompleteness

Gentle Regrets

If Benton had had an administration building with pillars it could have carved over the pillars: Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you feel guilty. . . . Many a Benton girl went back to her nice home, married her rich husband, and carried a fox in her bosom for the rest of her…

Wittgenstein's Poker The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers by David Edmonds and John Eidinow Ecco, 352 pp., $24 LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN and Karl Popper met only once--just after World War II, when Popper addressed the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club. Popper…