"He was history's most creative genius. What secrets can he teach us? The bestselling biographer brings Leonardo da Vinci to life in this exciting new biography. Drawing on thousands of pages from Leonardo's astonishing notebooks and new discoveries about his life and work, Walter Isaacson weaves a narrative that connects his art to his science. He shows how Leonardo's genius was based on skills we can improve in ourselves, such as passionate curiosity,...

The Innovators is Walter Isaacson's revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is also a history of the digital revolution and a guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail? Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter,...

"Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries, beginning with the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, and ending with the marine biologist and author Rachel Carson, who catalyzed the environmental movement. Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists --...

"Like Paul Farmer in Mountains Beyond Mountains, Paul English grew up poor, in working-class Boston, but as Tracy Kidder writes, he had "a mind for the age that was coming." Brilliant, reckless, endlessly energetic, Paul English, after Kayak sold for $2 billion, asked himself: What comes next? Start another company? Use his new wealth to make a difference in the world? With a riveting, page-turning narrative and unmatched storytelling skill, Kidder...

Quantum mechanics explains why the sun shines and how your eyes can see; it's the theory behind the LEDs in your phone and the nuclear hearts of space probes. But ask a physicist what quantum physics means, and the result will be a brawl. What does it mean for something to be real? Becker brings to vivid life the brave researchers whose quest for the truth led them to challenge Bohr-- and paid dearly, their reputations, careers, and sometimes lives...

This book describes how five famous scientists actually made major errors in the interpretation of their data and how the further investigations of these mistakes led to scientific breakthroughs in such disciplines as biology, medicine, and cosmology. Drawing on the lives of these five great scientists: Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle and Albert Einstein, the author shows how even the greatest scientists made...

Featuring the true stories of women creators and thinkers from around the world, throughout history, this book shows that sometimes seeing things a little differently can lead to big changes. Some names are well known, some are not, but all the women had a lasting effect on the fields they workd in. Whether they were breaking ground for innovative structures or breaking rules and creating new ones, the women profiled here not only made a place for...

"To date, everything written about Armstong's life and flights has been written from the outside looking in; Barbree is the only person whom Neil Armstrong trusted to share close personal details about his inspiring life story. Working from his years of notes, and with the full cooperation of the Armstrong family, Barbree has written the definitive biography of America's most famous astronaut and one of our greatest modern heroes. Much has already...

"What can we learn from the genes of our closest evolutionary relatives? Neanderthal Man tells the story of geneticist Svante Paabo's mission to answer that question, beginning with the study of DNA in Egyptian mummies in the early 1980s and culminating in his sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2009. From Paabo, we learn how Neanderthal genes offer a unique window into the lives of our hominin relatives and may hold the key to unlocking the mystery...

Recounts the life of the scientist whose theories of relativity revolutionized the way we look at space and time.