The Battle That Stopped Rome: Emperor Augustus, Arminius, and the Slaughter of the Legions in the Teutoburg Forest.
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Why the Germans do not speak a Romance language
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Tag Archives: book notes
A Novel of Ancient Rome
Give Me Back My Legions!, by Harry Turtledove. This is historical fiction, without any elements of alternate history or science fiction. I liked it much better than most of the Amazon reviewers did. Continue reading
Some books I read in 2009
Newton and the Counterfeiter
The origins of the Indo-Europeans
Galloglas
Chief of MacKay
Ian Grimble’s Chief
of Mackay is the first volume of his Strathnaver Trilogy:
…. bringing into focus
and describing in tragic detail the fate of the Mackay country –
Duthaich ‘Ic Aoidh – in the far northwest of Scotland. Because of gradual
changes in the idea of chieftainship, the people underwent a
transformation from a traditional tight-knit Gaelic-speaking community
to a down-trodden helot population to be cleared away at the will of the
landowner and replaced by sheep.
Gamma
I have read the first seven chapters of Julian Havil’s Gamma, mostly on the bus to and from work (a benefit of public transportation that does not get nearly enough attention, IMHO). It is slow going because I am working through all the mathematical derivations. These are very clearly presented so this is going well, but it still takes time. A couple modern proofs by Paul Erdös left my head spinning, but I have been able to follow (with appropriate awe), the classic results of Leonard Euler. I suppose this is appropriate given my historical interests :-)>
Math on the bus
After a long pause I have been reading more in Julian Havil’s Gamma, which I mentioned a couple months ago.
On the bus going home tonight I worked through Euler’s original solution of the Basel problem. I was just stunned by how clever that was.
This original solution was somewhat lacking in mathematical rigor–more like the sort of thing a physicist would do :-)> So I appreciated it all the more. Euler later went back and produced a rigorous version.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 