1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fascinating biography of a great scientist, May 26, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Jacques Hadamard: A Universal Mathematician (History of Mathematics, V. 14) (Hardcover)
The biography is written brilliantly and is quite fascinating. The 98-year long life of Hadamard was extraordinary, filled with fantastic joys, like playing the violin with Albert Einstein, and terrible hardships, as losing his three sons in the two World Wars. He was a man of amazing activity and great social commitment, being involved in the struggle for human rights. In his lifetime, the world was a scene of tremendous perturbations and changes in all respects, and so also in the area of science, where Hadamard was a great driving force especially in mathematics, but also in physics, mechanics, psycology of invention etc. Little did he realise during his career that his matrices later would be used in the coding theory of today.
The chapters about Hadamard's work in mathematical physics contains a lot of untraditional, interesting and almost unknown material. It is hard to find elsewhere such a complete and clearly written survey of the history of the disproval of several "obvious" hypotheses.
The text is tastefully mixed with illustrations and the occasional anecdote makes it a quite entertaining read. I can higly recommend it to anybody, from undergraduate students to high-level professionals.
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