GENERAL KNOWLEDGE: A Silly Selection (part III of IV)
Explore a quirky, curated book list blending history, education, and math—from Jared Diamond's *Collapse* to Simon Singh's *Fermat's Enigma*. A silly yet smart selection for curious readers.
Book
History of Beauty
by Umberto Eco
Explores the nature, the meaning, and the very history of the idea of beauty in Western culture; illustrated with abundant examples of painting and sculpture and lengthy quotations from writers and philosophers. Demonstrates how every historical era has had its own ideas about eye-appeal.
Book
The Well-trained Mind
by Susan Wise Bauer
This book will instruct you, step by step, on how to give your child an academically rigorous, comprehensive education from preschool through high school. Two veteran home educators outline the classical pattern of education'he trivium'hich organizes learning around the maturing capacity of the child's mind: the elementary school "grammar stage," the middle school "logic stage," and the high school "rhetoric stage." Using the trivium as your model, you'll be able to instruct your child in all levels of reading, writing, history, geography, mathematics, science, foreign languages, rhetoric, logic, art, and music, regardless of your own aptitude in those subjects. Newly revised and updated, The Well-Trained Mind includes detailed book lists with complete ordering information; up-to-date listings of resources, publications, and Internet links; and useful contacts.
Book
Collapse
by Jared M. Diamond
Explores the mysterious collapse of past civilizations - and what this means for our future.
Book
Fermat's Enigma
by Simon Singh
xn + yn = zn, where n represents 3, 4, 5, ...no solution "I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain." With these words, the seventeenth-century French mathematician Pierre de Fermat threw down the gauntlet to future generations. What came to be known as Fermat's Last Theorem looked simple; proving it, however, became the Holy Grail of mathematics, baffling its finest minds for more than 350 years. In Fermat's Enigma--based on the author's award-winning documentary film, which aired on PBS's "Nova"--Simon Singh tells the astonishingly entertaining story of the pursuit of that grail, and the lives that were devoted to, sacrificed for, and saved by it. Here is a mesmerizing tale of heartbreak and mastery that will forever change your feelings about mathematics.
