5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely Delightful Writing from a Time Long Gone, July 7, 2005
This review is from: Mathematics With Love: The Courtship Correspondence of Barnes Wallis, Inventor of the Bouncing Bomb (Macsci) (Hardcover)
If you watch the History Channel very much you will inevitably see a film clip of a rotating, garbage can looking, device being dropped from an airplane and see it skipping across the water. This was the bomb invented by Barnes Wallis to take out the Ruhr dams in Germany.
On April 23rd, 1922 Barnes met Molly. They began to write to each other, at her father's insistence they could only correspond if he used the letters to teach her mathematics. So he taught her calculus.
He proposed on Thursday December 21st 1922. She accepted on Friday September 12th 1924. They married April 23rd 1925. They were married for fifty years.
This is an absolutely delightful book from a time long past. I can only imagine if I told my daughter that her boyfriend could only correspond with her if he were using the letters to teach mathematics.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A real gem., April 10, 2010
This review is from: Mathematics With Love: The Courtship Correspondence of Barnes Wallis, Inventor of the Bouncing Bomb (Macsci) (Hardcover)
I have said this many, many times: the best writers are the English, the Irish and the Scots, not necessarily in that order.
I have just come across another gem. "Mathematics with Love: The Courtship Correspondence of Barnes Wallis, Inventor of the Bouncing Bomb" is the story and almost complete correspondence between Barnes Wallace and the love of his life, Molly Bloxam. It was "written" by one of their children, Mary Stopes-Roe, who was trained as a historian and psychologist. She worked for many years at the University of Birmingham where she studied parent-child interactions with families of Asian and British ethnic origin. While archiving her family's papers, she came across the courtship correspondence of her parents.
It is an incredible story and absolutely delightful.
At 17, Molly was on her way to university in London to study science and was struggling with math and physics. Her suitor was a 35-year-old shy man from England who had accepted a teaching job in Switzerland. From there, through their daily correspondence, he taught her math.
It is delightful to read the English phrases, to read the descriptions of university and Switzerland, to experience vicariously what was happening to two people between the end of World War I and leading up to World War II.
Most interesting is to see their feelings change for each other through the letters over time. At the outset he had fallen in love with her but was too shy to even say good-bye (he stood her up and left England without following through on his promise to say good-bye in person). For whatever reason, based on only one or two personal visits with him when the families visited, she took up correspondence with him. Perhaps he was only a sounding board for her in the beginning. But from there it developed into a full-fledged love affair.
So, I've started reading it. As one who loves math, journals, diaries, stories of love affairs, this is a real, real gem.
I see this book is available through Amazon resellers for $48. I got my redundant (and absolutely perfect condition with dust jacket) for $15.98, at the local Half-Price Bookstore in San Antonio.
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