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RR 2010/180 Historical Encyclopedia of Natural and Mathematical Sciences Ari Ben-Menahem Springer Berlin and New York, NY 2009URL: www.springer.com/math/book/978-3-540-68832-7 ISBN 978 3 540 68832 7 Last visited January 2010 £2245.50/$3369 (online and print combined) Also released as a six vol. printed set (ISBN 978 3 540 68831 0); this review based on the online version
Keywords Electronic media, History, Mathematics, Sciences
Review DOI 10.1108/09504121011045764
This massive work is available in two formats; the print version which comes in six volumes and nearly 6,000 pages, and an electronic version available from the publisher's SpringerLink web site. Although I assume the text is the same, I have only seen the electronic version and it is that which is reviewed here.
The first thing to say about this opus is that it is not an edited work, but has instead been produced almost entirely by a single author, a professor of mathematics and geophysics who spent 17 years of "intensive work" on this book. Encyclopedia is perhaps not the best description of the work, and indeed Professor Ben-Menahem refers to it as an "encyclopedic treatise", meant to blend "the essential historical data (chronology, biographies, major background political and economical events, etc.) together with science proper (principles, laws, experiments, observations, theories, equations, etc.)", thus informing the reader "not only who did it and when it was done" by the "marshaling of all scientific facts, activities and ideas in a definite order" (Vol. 1 p. xiii).
Presented in six epochal sections - Pre-Science (33 pages); Origins - Splendor of the Simple, 4200BCE-529BCE (450 pages); Slumber and Awakening, 529BCE-1583 (413 pages); The Clockwork Universe 1583-1819, (820 pages); Abstraction and Unification, 1820-1894 (1067 pages); Demise of the Dogmatic Universe, 1895-1950 (2278 pages); and Deep Principles - Complex Structures, 1950-2008 (905 pages), the book is predominately organized as a kind of timeline around a spine of some 2,000 biographies. These are mostly, but not always, of scientists, beginning in Origins with Gilgamesh, "legendary king of Uruk, Sumer", and ending in Demise of the Dogmatic Universe with Martin Deutsch (1917-2002). Lists of inventions, timelines of contemporary science and technologies, and a variety of appendices...