Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.
Title: Euclid's Window
Subtitle: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace
Author: Leonard Mlodinow
Narrator: Robert Blumenfeld
Format: Unabridged
Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
Language: English
Release date: 11-17-09
Publisher: Audible Studios
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 425 votes
Genres: History, World
Publisher's Summary:
Based on Mlodinow's extensive historical research; his studies alongside colleagues such as Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne; and interviews with leading physicists and mathematicians such as Murray Gell-Mann, Edward Witten, and Brian Greene, Euclid's Window is an extraordinary blend of rigorous, authoritative investigation and accessible, good-humored storytelling that makes a stunningly original argument asserting the primacy of geometry. For those who have looked through Euclid's Window, no space, no thing, and no time will ever be quite the same.
Members Reviews:
Wow!
A book about math, I know almost the definition of boring. NOT THIS ONE! I laughed and couldn't wait to get back to listening whenever I stopped. I was very sorry that it was over when done. I would buy a sequel in a heartbeat. The author is funny and makes the complex ideas understandable with everyday examples. Wonderfully well written and enjoyable.
Very entertaining and informative
This book is a great mix of science and history with a little humor to keep it moving, very good!
Not for Everyone
Having just finished the audio version of Leonard Mlodinows book, Euclids Window, I wish I could recommend it without caveat, but I cant. Mlodinow is obviously a gifted mathematician. His academic credentials include studies at the Max Planck Institute and the California Institute of Technology, where he served on the faculty for a number of years. Having spent some time as a graduate student at Caltech, I know what that means: the guys brilliant! Unfortunately mathematical brilliance doesnt necessarily translate into being an engaging writer.
Euclids Window takes the reader on a journey through five revolutions in the history of geometry, which is to say five revolutions in humanitys way of looking at the world. In the books introduction Mlodinow outlines this thesis in broad strokes and also describes the societal evolution that accompanied these intellectual changes. If the remainder of the book had merely continued this program, filling in Mlodinows arguments in more detail and sophistication, Id have been well pleased; but, in spite of his considerable mathematical expertise, Professor Mlodinow makes some surprisingly ineffective choices.
For instance, he seems to prefer cumbersome rather than straightforward examples. In discussing Riemanns theory of elliptical spaces, rather than refer to a simple imaginary sphere with convenient integral dimensions, he drags the reader through a labored geographical representation using the Earths surface. The result is a tedious litany of place names and mileages, which might have been instructive as a printed table, but makes for excruciating listening. Similar lumbering demonstrations occur throughout the book.
Lack of illustrations is another deficiency. I dont know whether the print version of Euclids Window employs diagrams its hard to imagine a book about geometry that doesn't! - but theyd have been impossible to convey in the audio format anyway. For listeners trying to assimilate unfamiliar concepts, this could be a significant handicap.
While the mathematical explanations in Euclids Window are cogent enough, I found the discussions of physics to be less so.