Siobhan Roberts

Inside the eccentric world of John Horton Conway, gifted polymath and inventor of the Game of Life.

The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway

Genius At Play

Donald Coxeter, The Man Who Saved Geometry

King of Infinite Space

The word geometry makes one think of circles, triangles, protractors and Pythagoras. By the middle of the 20th Century it all looked dead, as the excitement in maths had moved to computers and chaos theory. But one man - Donald Coxeter - kept the torch burning, showing how geometry is at the core of all mathematics, and indeed governs our life from architecture to car design, from animated films to food molecules. He showed the importance of geometry for data mining - now the most innovative area of computer research - and showed not only how beautiful the mathematics of shape is, but also how vitally important.

Donald Coxeter, the Man who Saved Geometry

Profiles the life and work of mathematician Donald Coxeter, discussing his efforts to prove geometry is an ever-evolving endeavor that forms the building blocks for creation.

Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry

With Wind Wizard, Siobhan Roberts brings us the story of Alan Davenport (1932-2009), the father of modern wind engineering, who investigated how wind navigates the obstacle course of the earth's natural and built environments--and how, when not properly heeded, wind causes buildings and bridges to teeter unduly, sway with abandon, and even collapse. In 1964, Davenport received a confidential telephone call from two engineers requesting tests on a pair of towers that promised to be the tallest in the world. His resulting wind studies on New York's World Trade Center advanced the art and science of wind engineering with one pioneering innovation after another. Establishing the first dedicated "boundary layer" wind tunnel laboratory for civil engineering structures, Davenport enabled the study of the atmospheric region from the earth's surface to three thousand feet, where the air churns with turbulent eddies, the average wind speed increasing with height. The boundary layer wind tunnel mimics these windy marbled striations in order to test models of buildings and bridges that inevitably face the wind when built. Over the years, Davenport's revolutionary lab investigated and improved the wind-worthiness of the world's greatest structures, including the Sears Tower, the John Hancock Tower, Shanghai's World Financial Center, the CN Tower, the iconic Golden Gate Bridge, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, the Sunshine Skyway, and the proposed crossing for the Strait of Messina, linking Sicily with mainland Italy. Chronicling Davenport's innovations by analyzing select projects, this popular-science book gives an illuminating behind-the-scenes view into the practice of wind engineering, and insight into Davenport's steadfast belief that there is neither a structure too tall nor too long, as long as it is supported by sound wind science.

Siobhan Roberts

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