Posted in audio book, book review, history, math

Book Review-History

Significant Figures: The Lives and Work of Great Mathematicians

by Ian Stewart

Audiobooklife rating: 🤠🤠🤠🤠

This audio book was almost twelve hours in duration. Took me less than two days. The progression of math has been well studied and documented throughout history. It’s unbelievable we are able to follow it in such detail. Put me in a good mood. Quarantine has given me time to reflect and bulldoze digital audio books. What are you reading or listening to while being quarantined? Reading is therapeutic and helps make the state of affairs less painful and the sky more blue. 😀

Anyways the author is an acclaimed mathematician, a science fiction writer and Emeritus professor at Warwick in England. Math can be an intimidating and exigent subject. He makes the subject matter understandable and oh so enjoyable! It spans two-thousand years and touches on twenty five mathematicians through short biography. It’s a wonderful compendium of great minds that have discovered and created systems of math used today. None of which are alive. Shout out📢 to all living amateur and professional mathematicians! From the great geometer to the creation of algebra to the advent of super computers this book has it. There was even a chapter on Benoit Mandelbrot and fractal geometry. I love fractals! Nature is full of fractals. They are never ending patterns and you are free to get lost in them. ∛

I have a profound reverence for math myself. Everything in the universe obeys geometric rules and ratios. Through logic and deduction you can reduce all phenomenon in nature to mathematical axioms and laws. Also being a science major I had to reach at least the level of calculus. Why? Calculus was required for genetics. Genetics was required for cell biology. Cell biology was required for biochemistry. You get the idea. I spent many semesters in math class and we are well acquainted. ∞

My favorite mathematician would have to be Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. He is the father of algebra and the word algorithm derives from his manuscripts (see The Sieve of Eratosthenes). His work helped society get wages and inheritances properly and was one of the most famous scholars in The House of Wisdom. So much science and math were discovered in the ancient middle east. Pretty incredible! I guess that is one defining characteristic of people. The quest for knowledge, insight, understanding and awareness. Of course, Issac Newton (co-inventor of calculus) will always hold a special place in my heart. ∫

A little side joke. How would you define a significant figure? Google defines it as: each of the digits of a number that are used to express it to the required degree of accuracy, starting from the first nonzero digit. In a nutshell “Sig figs” are used in science and medicine to estimate how many decimal places are needed. 😆

Number is the ruler of all forms!

Michael 👊




Rating: 9.1 of 10




LTC John Nagl and Gen David Petraeus






Some of what I learned:

  3. The guerrilla wins by not losing.




Rating: 8.86 of 10






Some of what I learned:

Posted in audio book, book review, particle physics, science


Rating: 9.35 of 10








peter Peter Higgs (Nobel Laureate 2013 in physics)

Some of what I learned:

  4. The internet was invented by CERN.








Posted in audio book, Iraq War, Military, POW






Some of what I learned:

  1. There are no safe jobs in the military.

pics: thank you and








Some of what I learned:

  3. All stress is self-induced.


pic: thank you

Posted in audio book, history

Big history

My current book is forty-five plus hours so it will take me at least three or four days total. Technically this would be my longest book ever. The Outline of History by HG Wells was forty-four hours followed by The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer at forty-one hours.

So we can talk about a book I finished recently. Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present by Cynthia Stokes Brown. This was eleven hours and took less than two days. I was surprised at how detailed this book was, especially regarding the big bang. It’s a great read.

What I learned:

  1. Matter and energy are interchangeable but only at temperatures approaching a trillion degrees. (E=mc²). So matter is energy at rest when not at those ungodly temperatures.
  2. The inverse square law gives rise to the elliptical movement of the planets. This was calculated by Sir Issac Newton and published in his paper Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687.
  3. The Club of Rome commissioned an article entitled The Limits of Growth in 1972. This was a computer simulation of exponential economic and population growth.