Start-Up: the book

Well yesterday I noticed this strange formula. Would it be that 7 is a magic number and I would go from rational to irrational – though start-ups are often irrational aventures too? No: 7 is not alone, the formula applies to 5 [25=24+1], 3 [9=8+1], and so on: 11, 17. So prime numbers? Not even, true for any integer… I felt a little stupid when I found it is just a particular application of a^2 – b^2 = (a-b) x (a +b)!!

I love maths, but maths is not just magical numbers, it’s much broader. And I love to read books on the topic. There is poetry and beauty in math, for sure. To conclude this unusual post, here is a list of books I enjoyed reading in the past. In no particular order, but thematic.

There are still “many” unsolved problems in mathematics. The most famous one is probably proving the Riemann hypothesis. Here are 2 books developing the story:

(Please click on image for a link to the book)

Indeed there is a million-dollar prize offered to 7 such problems by the Clay Institute. And the first solved one is the Poincare Conjecture by Grigori Perelman. Perelman declined the prize but this is another story!

Before the Millenium problems, there were the Hilbert Problems. At the time, the Fermat theorem was probably the most famous challenge!

And as 2 last examples, but I could mention so many more, here are two biographies of extremely strange geniuses, Srinivasa Ramanujan and Paul Erdös

Maybe one day, I’ll be back with more on the topic of math and more broadly about popular science books! Don’t hesitate to give me examples and advice

NB: if you want to check the French versions, go to the article: http://www.startup-book.com/fr/2012/11/19/7-x-7-7-1-x-71-1/

Freeman Dyson is a strange scientific blend of wise and moderate conservatism and pioneer of iconoclasm. He advocates cold analysis but loves what is strange. I just read The Scientist as Rebel, a wonderful book where everyone can find his or her share of intellectual stimulation.

Any relationship with innovation or entrepreneurial high-tech? Very little directly, and the subject is closer to my other articles on the books about reflexions on science (Smolin, Ségalat for example). There are actually many connections between scientific research and technology innovation, not the least being the question of creativity. Another tenuous link: he is the father of Esther Dyson, famous venture-capitalist in Silicon Valley.

Failure is another example. In an interview Dyson gave before writing this book said about its role: “You can’t possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It’s a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we’ve been building them for 100 years, it’s very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works – it’s even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential. The same is true of airplanes.” From Freeman Dyson’s Brain

The Title “The Scientist as Rebel” also reminds me the quote by Pitch Johnson which I had mentioned in Entrepreneurs and Revolutions: “Entrepreneurs are the revolutionaries of our time.” And he had added: “Democracy works best when there is this kind of turbulence in the society, when those not well-off have a chance to climb the economic ladder by using brains, energy and skills to create new markets or serve existing markets better then their old competitors”

In this book, Dyson writes about ethics, religion, climate change and about scientists as different as Gödel, Erdös, Hardy, Oppenheimer, Feynman of course, Teller the indefensible, and Thomas Gold whom I had never heard of.

The chapter is called “A Modern Heretic.” Gold has covered topics as diverse as
- the physiology of the ear (validated 30 years later despite resistance of many kinds),
- the instability of Earth’s axis of rotation,
- the abiotic origin of natural gas and oil, (i. e. not derived from the degradation of living creatures)
- the existence of life within the Earth’s crust,
- the interpretation of pulsars.
He had no fear of making mistakes on such topics as
- the steady state universe,
- the moon’s surface being covered with a fine rock powder.
Gold was “an intruder but certainly not an ignorant” and added that “science is not fun if the scientist is never wrong.” I just found another blogger article on Gold: The Radical Ideas Of Thomas Gold.

Dyson has written a challenging, exciting book, and I can only encourage its discovery!