Bradshaw, Gillian - The Sand-Reckoner
This, oddly enough, may be the Bradshaw that I fell in love with most quickly. It took me a while to warm to Island of Ghosts, largely because it was the first Bradshaw I'd read, and while I liked The Beacon at Alexandria, it didn't make me grin as immediately as this one.
Er, mostly that's because the two weren't on math.
The Sand-Reckoner is on Archimedes. Unlike the first two Bradshaws I've read, it's not in first-person, largely because Archimedes' first-person POV would probably be completely incomprehensible to most people. While he's the focus of the story, the book is also on his reluctant slave Marcus, along with his city's ongoing war with Rome and possibly Carthage.
And because I am a giant dork, my favorite part of the book wasn't Marcus, who is a wonderful character, but the math and the wonder of it, the sheer geekery of remembering bits and pieces of high school geometry and calculus, double cones, hyperbolae and parabolae. The sheer brilliance of Archimedes is astounding, and the best part is that Bradshaw isn't making it up. Obviously, Archimedes' personality may not be historically accurate, but it's just so cool reading about him trying to figure out pi as a way to cope with grief (and actually naming it "pi"), and how he doesn't think his inventions are marvellous and wonderful, simply common-sense.
I never thought I would gravitate toward Bradshaw's books because of how she portrays intellectual interests, but that's turned out to be a big draw for both this book and The Beacon at Alexandria. It's strangely exciting reading about people studying things they love, and even though they're things I may not love or understand, the sheer joy in scholarship and knowledge is infectious.
I miss school now. And I feel bad that I was never wonderful at math -- I always understood enough to do it, but I never had that beautiful, instinctual grasp of the workings behind it that Archimedes did. But then, that's what made the book such a joy to read.
I keep thinking of this as a very Yoon-ish book, given the math and the music.
Sometimes, I'd feel like people were overly awed by Archimedes, and then I would think on what he was actually doing and how ahead of the times he was, and I would completely understand why Marcus says that even if Archimedes were his enemy, he would never kill him because it would be such an irreparable loss to human understanding.
My very favorite part of the book was Archimedes grieving over his father's death. He sits and scribbles on the floor to try and figure out the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference, and when his mother finally talks to him, he says something like: This number is infinite! It goes on forever, no matter how much I narrow it down. And maybe, since there's some part of our minds that understand and grasp an infinite number, maybe there's some part of us that's infinite as well.
Links:
rilina's review
Er, mostly that's because the two weren't on math.
The Sand-Reckoner is on Archimedes. Unlike the first two Bradshaws I've read, it's not in first-person, largely because Archimedes' first-person POV would probably be completely incomprehensible to most people. While he's the focus of the story, the book is also on his reluctant slave Marcus, along with his city's ongoing war with Rome and possibly Carthage.
And because I am a giant dork, my favorite part of the book wasn't Marcus, who is a wonderful character, but the math and the wonder of it, the sheer geekery of remembering bits and pieces of high school geometry and calculus, double cones, hyperbolae and parabolae. The sheer brilliance of Archimedes is astounding, and the best part is that Bradshaw isn't making it up. Obviously, Archimedes' personality may not be historically accurate, but it's just so cool reading about him trying to figure out pi as a way to cope with grief (and actually naming it "pi"), and how he doesn't think his inventions are marvellous and wonderful, simply common-sense.
I never thought I would gravitate toward Bradshaw's books because of how she portrays intellectual interests, but that's turned out to be a big draw for both this book and The Beacon at Alexandria. It's strangely exciting reading about people studying things they love, and even though they're things I may not love or understand, the sheer joy in scholarship and knowledge is infectious.
I miss school now. And I feel bad that I was never wonderful at math -- I always understood enough to do it, but I never had that beautiful, instinctual grasp of the workings behind it that Archimedes did. But then, that's what made the book such a joy to read.
I keep thinking of this as a very Yoon-ish book, given the math and the music.
Sometimes, I'd feel like people were overly awed by Archimedes, and then I would think on what he was actually doing and how ahead of the times he was, and I would completely understand why Marcus says that even if Archimedes were his enemy, he would never kill him because it would be such an irreparable loss to human understanding.
My very favorite part of the book was Archimedes grieving over his father's death. He sits and scribbles on the floor to try and figure out the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference, and when his mother finally talks to him, he says something like: This number is infinite! It goes on forever, no matter how much I narrow it down. And maybe, since there's some part of our minds that understand and grasp an infinite number, maybe there's some part of us that's infinite as well.
Links:
rilina's review