From Baseball to the Big Bang: What Faculty Are Reading
Image by Dan Dry
Sam Peltzman
Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics
Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, Jane Leavy (HarperCollins, 2002)
“Sandy Koufax was the greatest Jewish athlete in recorded history. He also was the greatest athlete in the history of Lafayette High School, in Brooklyn, New York, where I was in the class of ’56, just a few years behind him. And he may well have been the best left-handed pitcher in baseball history. Anyone with even a mild interest in baseball will find this book worthwhile.
“Many of its reviews focus on Koufax’s desire to avoid the limelight, but I was more struck by the physical agony that marked his career. The only reason I had to qualify the claim that he was the greatest lefty of all time is the shortness of his career, due to irremediable arm trouble—a battle against pain that lasted several years. Koufax retired prematurely when threatened with permanent loss of arm function. Leavy’s book tells a tale of great courage and, ultimately, of the wisdom to call it quits in the middle of a great career.”
Darren Roulstone
Associate Professor of Accounting
“Recently, I discovered Simon Singh, a BBC producer and popular science writer, and have enjoyed three of his books.”
Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe (HarperCollins, 2004)
“I greatly enjoyed Singh’s style of telling science through the scientists’ stories. A useful feature is Singh’s comparison between competing scientific theories and ‘grading’ them on various characteristics. While it is easy to criticize past scholars who accepted false theories (e.g., an Earth-centered solar system), Singh shows that, given the state of scientific knowledge at the time, many now-discarded theories made scientific sense for several centuries with the truth not winning out until empirical evidence, mathematics, and competing theories improved.”
The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography (Doubleday, 1999)
“This book combines a discussion of cryptographic methods, the mathematics behind them, and the use of cryptography in history. For example, the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, rested on the breaking of a coded message sent between Mary (in prison) and her followers. A later chapter highlights the efforts of British code breakers to read German WWII messages created using the Enigma machine. The first person to break the Enigma codes was a Polish army officer who combined brilliant deduction with knowledge of the machine’s design (obtained from a German traitor) in the 1930s. The book concludes with a discussion of the encryption techniques needed to make Internet commerce possible. For those who really get into code breaking, Singh includes an appendix of coded messages with a prize offered for the first reader to break all of them. I’m sure someone has done it by now, but even if the prize is still out there, I’m not going to attempt them!”
Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem (Walker, 1997)
“This book tells a story increasingly rare in modern science: a major breakthrough carried out largely by one person. In the late 1980s Andrew Wiles, a mathematician at Princeton, decided to act on a boyhood dream and attempt to single-handedly prove ‘Fermat’s Last Theorem,’ a conjecture in number theory that mathematicians had been trying to prove (or disprove) for hundreds of years. Wiles finally succeeded by proving a conjecture that indirectly proved the theorem. The math is not the main component of the book; Singh conveys the difficulty and scope of the problem and the testament Wiles’s solution is to his genius and effort.”
