Robert Kanigel Bücher

This moving and astonishing biography tells the improbable story of India-born Srinavasa Ramanujan Iyengar, self-taught mathematical prodigy. In 1913 Ramanujan, a 25-year-old clerk who had flunked out of two colleges, wrote a letter filled with startlingly original theorems to eminent English mathematician G. H. Hardy. Struck by the Indian's genius, Hardy, member of the Cambridge Apostles and an obsessive cricket aficionado, brought Ramanujan to England. Over the next five years, the vegetarian Brahmin who claimed his discoveries were revealed to him by a Hindu goddess turned out influential mathematical propositions. Cut off from his young Indian wife left at home and emotionally neglected by fatherly yet aloof Hardy, Ramanujan returned to India in 1919, depressed, sullen and quarrelsome; he died one year later of tuberculosis. Kanigel ( Apprentice to Genius ) gives nontechnical readers the flavor of how Ramanujan arrived at his mathematical ideas, which are used today in cosmology and computer science. Description from Publisher's Weekly.

A young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor chose a factory over Harvard -- and his decision has made all the difference in the world as we know it today.Using what he'd learned as an apprentice in a machine shop, Taylor forged his industrial philosophy, Scientific Management -- the source of our fierce, unholy obsession with "efficiency". According to management guru Peter Drucker, Taylorism is perhaps the "most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers". Evoking a time when the industrial world was young, new, and exciting, Robert Kanigel illuminates the man whose ceaseless quest for "the one best way" changed the very texture and purpose of twentieth-century life.

Focusing on personal transformation, Robert Kanigel's memoir recounts his evolution from a conventional engineer to a celebrated writer, all set against the backdrop of Baltimore's vibrant culture. Through a reflective narrative, he shares the challenges and triumphs of his unconventional journey, emphasizing the importance of love and work in shaping his identity. This memoir serves as an inspiring testament for aspiring writers, highlighting the potential for creativity to emerge from unexpected paths.