Customer Reviews

Buffon: A Life in Natural History (Cornell History of Science Series)

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This book is a bit of a disappointment. It is described on the front flap as 'magisterial' and the life's work of Jacques Roger, but ultimately it comes up short. After all, the one thing that Buffon is famous for is Buffon's Needle, the brilliant combination of ideas in differential geometry and probability, that initiated the whole area of what is now called geometric probability. Yet in Roger's biography it is barely mentioned: he gives it just one half page, and no analysis. Laplace, who corrected Buffon's calculation, is not mentioned at all in this context. Roger even seems unaware that Buffon's Needle is related to the experimental determination of the value of pi.

So, if you are interested in Buffon's mathematical ideas this is not the book for you. You won't find this book helpful if you are interested in physics, either. Or Newtonianism, for that matter. (Roger's opinions on the Newton-Leibniz controversy seem more informed by his anti-Englishness than any real understanding of who invented the calculus.) We really need a second book to cover these matters properly. What the book covers very well is Buffon the naturalist, and Buffon the anthropologist. Here Roger is in his element. The prose style of the book (or at least the translation) is occasionally choppy, but what is important is that one can see through it to something of the man and his work...or some of his work, at least.