Forgotten Genius

Albin Planinc was born in the middle of the Second World War, on 18th April 1944, in the little village of Brise, near the small town of Zagorje ob Savi, approximately 30 kilometers from Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. He spent his childhood with his mother Ljudmila (unofficially Milka), a simple, uneducated woman who earned money from various unskilled jobs'. This fascinating biography of over eighty-five annotated games and stories are being presented by grandmasters Georg Mohr and Adrian Mikhalchishin. It covers Planinc' entire life and chess career, including his most fascinating games. This fitting tribute of a forgotten chess genius should be found in anyone's chess library. Thanks to this colorful book Albin Planinc will continue to inspire us all and will keep his spirit alive.

In Inwood's biography of this forgotten scientist, Robert Hooke and his world are vividly recreated with all their contradictions, successes, and failures. The Forgotten Genius is an absorbing and compelling study of this unduly overlooked man.

The award-winning author of Wondrous Strange, the critically acclaimed biography of Glenn Gould, explores the bizarre, untold life of another brilliant and eccentric musician. The composer Arnold Schoenberg called him an “utterly extraordinary” pianist of “incredible originality and conviction,” yet today he is all but forgotten. Born in Budapest in 1903, Ervin Nyiregyházi (nyeer-edge-hah-zee) was a remarkable prodigy: at eight he performed at Buckingham Palace, and when he was thirteen a psychologist published a book about him. In his teens, his idiosyncratic, intensely Romantic playing electrified audiences and astounded critics in Europe and America. But his adult career quickly foundered, and he was reduced to penury. In 1928, he settled in Los Angeles, and eventually he withdrew from public life, preferring to spend his time quietly composing. Psychologically, he remained a child, and found the ordinary demands of daily life onerous — he struggled even to dress himself. He drank heavily, was insatiable sexually (he married ten times), and described himself as “a fortissimo bastard,” yet such was his talent and charisma that he numbered among his friends and champions celebrities such as Jack Dempsey, Theodore Dreiser, Bela Lugosi, and Gloria Swanson. Rediscovered in the 1970s, he enjoyed a brief, sensational, and controversial renaissance before slipping back into obscurity. He died in 1987. Lost Genius, the product of ten years’ research, is the first biography of Nyiregyházi, whose story is among the most fascinating — and bizarre — in twentieth-century music.

The strange and eventful story of one of the unsung heroes of modern science, Robert Hooke, whose reputation was overshadowed by Sir Christopher Wren &Sir Isaac Newton.

FINALIST! 2019 IEEE William and Joyce Middleton Electrical Engineering History Award This biography of Oliver Heaviside profiles the life of an underappreciated genius and describes his many contributions to electrical science, which proved to be essential to the future of mass communications. Oliver Heaviside (1850 -1925) may not be a household name but he was one of the great pioneers of electrical science: his work led to huge advances in communications and became the bedrock of the subject of electrical engineering as it is taught and practiced today. His ideas and original accomplishments are now so much a part of everyday electrical science that they are simply taken for granted; almost nobody wonders how they came about and Heaviside's name has been lost from view. This book tells the complete story of this extraordinary though often unappreciated scientist. The author interweaves details of Heaviside's life and personality with clear explanations of his many important contributions to the field of electrical engineering. He describes a man with an irreverent sense of fun who cared nothing for social or mathematical conventions and lived a fiercely independent life. His achievements include creating the mathematical tools that were to prove essential to the proper understanding and use of electricity, finding a way to rid telephone lines of the distortion that had stifled progress, and showing that electrical power doesn't flow in a wire but in the space alongside it. At first his ideas were thought to be weird, even outrageous, and he had to battle long and hard to get them accepted. Yet by the end of his life he was awarded the first Faraday Medal. This engrossing story will restore long-overdue recognition to a scientist whose achievements in many ways were as crucial to our modern age as those of Edison's and Tesla's.

Popular science writer Kitty Ferguson investigates little-explored byroads in the history of science, from Kepler's nearly disastrous venture into science fiction to a twentieth-century experiment involving cats and rocket fuel. She introduces long-forgotten discoverers and takes us on astounding adventures with the likes of Jesuit astronomer Ferdinand Verbiest, who invented the first automobile and won a bizarre astronomy competition in seventeenth-century China against his former torturer.

Long before Wordsworth etherealized him as 'the marvellous Boy / The sleepless Soul that perished in its pride', Thomas Chatterton was touted as the 'second Shakespeare' by eighteenth-century Shakespeareans, ranked among the leading British poets by prominent literary critics, and likened to the fashionable modern prose stylists Macpherson, Sterne, and Smollett. His pseudo-medieval Rowley poems, in particular, engendered a renewed fascination with ancient English literature. With Chatterton as its case study, this book offers new insights into the formation and development of literary scholarship in the period, from the periodical press to the public lecture, from the review to the anthology, from textual to biographical criticism. Cook demonstrates that, while major scholars found Chatterton to be a pertinent subject for multiple literary debates in the eighteenth century, by the end of the Romantic period he had become, and still remains, an unsettling model of hubristic genius.

"This book provides the reader with an explanation of the origin and establishment of quantum mechanics, with the mathematics in a digestible form, together with a descriptive survey of later developments up to the present day. The mathematical treatment closely follows the original treatment, but in modern terms, using uniform symbolism as much as possible and with simplifications (e.g. the use of one dimension instead of three) to avoid unnecessarily complicated-looking mathematics." "Containing an extensive bibliography and useful appendices as well as references to original works, reviews, and biographies, the reader is well-equipped to delve further into the subject. In addition to its importance for those studying physics, it is also valuable for those studying the history of science."--Jacket.