In "Euclid's Window", Leonard Mlondinow takes us on a brilliantly entertaining j
ourney through 3,000 years of genius and geometry, introducing the people who re
volutionized the way we see the world around us. Ever since Pythagoras hatched a
'little scheme' to invent a set of rules describing the entire universe, scient
ists and mathematicians have tried to seek order in the cosmos: Euclid, who in 3
00BC defined the nature of space; Descartes, a fourteenth-century gambler and id
ler who invented the graph; Gauss, the fifteen-year-old genius who discovered th
at space is curved; Einstein, who added time to the equation; and Witten, who us
hered in today's weird new world of extra, twisted dimensions. They all show how
geometry is the key to understanding the universe.
