Short Book Reviews (notes) On-Line 1997

LONGITUDE. The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.	D. Sobel.
THE OTHERS. How Animals Made Us Human.	P. Shepard.
THE FORGOTTEN POLLINATORS.	S.L. Buchmann and G.P. Nabhan.
DISEASE AND CLASS. Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society.	G.D. Feldberg.
THE THREAD OF LIFE. The Story of Genes and Genetic Engineering.	S. Aldridge.
GLOBAL BIODIVERSITY ASSESSMENT. Published for the United Nations Environment Programme.	V.H. Heywood(Ed.).
F.Y. EDGEWORTH: WRITINGS IN PROBABILITY, STATISTICS AND ECONOMICS. Volume I: The Theory of Probability and the Law of Error. Volume II: The Theory of Statistics. Volume III: A	C.R. McCann, Jr. (Ed.).
CHARLES DARWIN. The Man and his Influence.	P.J. Bowler.
CHARLES DARWIN'S LETTERS . A Selection 1825-1859.	F. Burkhardt (Ed.s). Foreword by S.J. Gould.
JULIA. A Life in Mathematics.	C. Reid.
FEYNMAN'S LOST LECTURE. The Motion of Planets Around the Sun.	D.L. Goodstein and J.R. Goodstein.
ROBUST STATISTICAL PROCEDURES, 2nd edition.	P.J. Huber.
NONPARAMETRIC METHODS FOR QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS, 3rd edition.	J.D. Gibbons.
STATISTICS AND PUBLIC POLICY.	B.D. Spencer (Ed.).
TOP SECRET EXCHANGE: The Tizard Mission and the Scientific War.	D. Zimmerman.
MATHEMATICAL ENCOUNTERS OF THE SECOND KIND.	P.J. Davis.
INDISCRETE THOUGHTS.	G.-C. Rota. F. Palombi (Ed.).
THE QUOTABLE EINSTEIN.	A. Calaprice (Ed.). Foreword by F. Dyson.
THE CIGARETTE PAPERS.	S.A. Glantz, J. Slade, L.A. Bero, P. Hanauer and D.E. Barnes. Foreword by C.E. Koop former Surgeon General.
MARGINAL WORTH. Teaching and the Academic Labor Market.	L.S. Lewis.
THE BEGGAR AND THE PROFESSOR. A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga.	E.L. Ladurie. Translated by A. Goldhammer.
AMERICAN ASTRONOMY. Community, Careers, and Power, 1859-1940.	J. Lankford.
HUXLEY. EVOLUTION'S HIGH PRIEST.	A. Desmond.
THE EDUCATED MIND. How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding.	K. Egan.
WOULD-BE WORLDS. How Simulation is Changing the Frontiers of Science.	J.L. Casti.
COUNTEREXAMPLES IN PROBABILITY, 2nd edition.	J.M. Stoyanov.
CELESTIAL ENCOUNTERS. The Origins of Chaos and Stability.	F. Diacu and P. Holmes.
POSSIBLE HEALTH EFFECTS OF EXPOSURE TO RESIDENTIAL ELECTRIC AND MAGNETIC FIELDS. Committee on the Possible Effects of Electromagnetic Fields on Biologic Systems.	National Research Council.
A SOLUTION TO THE ECOLOGICAL INFERENCE PROBLEM. Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data.	G. King.
IMPURE SCIENCE. AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge.	S. Epstein.
BEYOND SCIENCE. The wider human context.	J. Polkinghorne.
IMAGINED WORLDS.	F. Dyson.
SELECTED PAPERS. VOLUME 7. THE NON-RADIAL OSCILLATIONS OF STARS IN GENERAL RELATIVITY AND OTHER WRITINGS.	S. Chandrasekhar.
RAMANUJAN. Letters and Commentary. History of Mathematics, Volume 9.	B.C. Bernt and R.A. Rankin.
FERMAT'S LAST THEOREM. The Story of a Riddle that Confounded the World's Greatest Minds for 358 Years	S. Singh.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF GAME THEORY. Volumes I, II, and III.	M.A. Dimand and R.W. Dimand (Eds.).
ADVANCES IN THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF STATISTICS. A Volume in Honor of Samuel Kotz.	N.L. Johnson and N. Balakrishnan (Eds.)
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF STATISTICAL SCIENCES. Update Volume 1.	S. Kotz (Ed.).
THE ASSESSMENT CHALLENGE IN STATISTICS EDUCATION.	I. Gal and J.B. Garfield (Eds.).
SURVEY MANAGEMENT AND PROCESS QUALITY.	L. Lyberg, P. Biemer, M. Collins, E. de Leeuw, C. Dippo, N. Schwarz and D. Trewin (Eds.).
RANDOMIZATION, BOOTSTRAP AND MONTE CARLO METHODS IN BIOLOGY, 2nd edition.	B.F.J. Manly.
ELEMENTS OF MULTIVARIATE TIME SERIES ANALYSIS, 2nd edition.	G.C. Reinsel.

From the book jacket: "Anyone alive in the 18th century would have known that 'the longitude problem' was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day- and had been for centuries. Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as they lost sight of land. Thousands of lives, and the increasing fortunes of nations, hung on a resolution.
"The quest for a solution had occupied scientists and their patrons for the better part of two centuries when, in 1714, Parliament upped the ante by offering a king's ransom (,20,000) to anyone whose method or device proved successful. Countless quacks weighed in with preposterous suggestions. The scientific establishment throughout Europe-from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton-had mapped the heavens in both hemispheres in its certain pursuit of a celestial answer. In stark contrast, one man, John Harrison, dared to imagine a mechanical solution-a clock that would keep time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land.
"Longitude is the dramatic story of an epic scientific quest, and of Harrison's forty-year obsess-ion with building his perfect timekeeper known today as the chronometer. Full of heroism and chicanery, brilliance and the absurd, it is also a fascinating brief history of astronomy, navigation and clock-making."

From the book jacket: "[The author] argues that humans evolved while watching other animal species, participating in their world, suffering them as parasites, wearing their feathers and skins, and making tools of their bones and antlers. For millennia, we have communicated their significance by dancing, sculpting, performing, imaging, narrating, and thinking them. The human species cannot be fully itself without these others.

From the book jacket: "[The authors] explore the vital but little-appreciated relationship between plants and the animals they depend on for reproduction- bees, beetles, butterflies, hummingbirds, moths, bats, and countless other animals, some widely recognized and others almost unknown."

From the book jacket: "Until a decade ago, the conquest of tuberculosis seemed one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. The resurgence of TB in the wake of AIDS has to be understood, in the context of decisions the U.S. Public Health Service made, beginning in the 1930s, to prevent TB through improved hygiene and long-term treatment with medications, rather than with the programs of BCG vaccination that Canada and many other countries adopted.
"Feldberg's aim is not to judge which was the right choice, but to explain why the U.S. rejected the vaccine and the consequences of that choice. To American physicians, TB, the conditions that fostered it, and the kind of people who got it were a direct threat to their own middle-class values, institutions, and prosperity. They prescribed vigorous social reform, and by the 1960s, they were convinced the strategy had worked. But, as the country's commitment to strong social welfare programs waned, the bacteriological reality of TB reasserted itself.
"Feldberg challenges us to recognize that the interplay of disease, class, and the practice of medicine can have unexpected consequences for the health of nations."

The author gives a guide to the world of DNA and also explores the applications of genetic engineering in biotechnology.

From the book jacket: "The true number of plant and animal species that inhabit our planet is not yet known. Nearly two million species have been identified by scientists, but estimates of the number yet to be described have ranged from 10 million to 30 million. It is now recognized that this diversity is important not just for the intrinsic appeal of a varied natural environment, but because biodiversity is essential for the maintenance of the Earth's natural systems. ...
"Around 1500 biological and social scientists from around the world have contributed their knowledge and expertise to the Assessment, providing an unprecedented source of information for decision-makers, officials, scientists and any others interested in the future of our planet.
"The Global Diversity Assessment was commissioned by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and funded by the Global Environment Facility."

From the introduction: "`In fine, there is a danger that the original and important contributions which Edgeworth made to the foundation and application
of mathematical statistics are at present little known, and may be lost except to a few conscientious students.'
"The statistician Arthur L. Bowley made this statement in 1928 as he prepared a brief summarization of Francis Ysidro Edgeworth's writings in the areas of mathematical statistics and probability theory. In a similar vein, the editors of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society noted on the occasion of Edge-worth's death in 1926: 'It is hoped that some means will be found of collating Edgeworth's statistical papers and making them available to serious students of the theory of the subject' (p.377). Up to that time, the only comprehensive collection of Edgeworth's writing was in the field of economics, this collected by Edgeworth himself and published by Macmillan in three volumes in 1925 under the title Papers Relating to Political Economy. The statistics and probability articles have not been assembled until now in a comprehensive collection.
"As Bowley, esteemed as Edgeworth's only disciple, opined at the time, the reason for the lack of a comprehensive collection of Edgeworth's work in probability theory and mathematical statistics and the applications thereof is that the articles themselves showed the evolutionary development in Edgeworth's own thoughts; he frequently 'threw caution to the wind' and hurried into print with an idea before he had completely, or even adequately, thought out the details. The details were left to be refined and mistakes corrected in later articles, often on different subjects and published in miscellaneous journals devoted to distinct audiences. If for only this reason, one needs to view the works assembled in their entirety. Indeed, one cannot appreciate any single contribution in isolation, for each builds on and amplifies the arguments introduced in the earlier pieces. At times, Edgeworth accepted nomenclature as standard which he had concocted for other purposes; at times it appears as though he assumed the reader to possess the information contained in these disparate writings, and so be capable of fol-lowing through his new arguments, including all the subtle nuances. This seems to be true of all save the encyclopedia contributions, which of course are survey pieces designed as general guides to an uninformed populous. As the statistician Maurice Kendall observed in referring to the Herculean effort of Bowley in summarizing Edgeworth's contributions to mathematical statistics, "It was often necessary to collate differ-ent papers to obtain complete proofs; some papers refer to others in a manner reminiscent of that style of legislation by reference which makes Acts of Parliament so hard to follow...' [Kendall, 1968, Biometrika, Vol. 55].
"For these purposes and others, when it was decided to venture into a comprehensive collection of Edgeworth's statistical works, it became evident that the pieces should be presented as they appeared origin-ally, not rewritten or edited for length or content, or refined so as to reflect modern sensibilities. The nuances, the peculiarities of style and format, in short the 'Edgeworthness' of these selections are as important as the essence of the arguments they display; insofar as these 'oddities' allow an insight into the mind and character of Edgeworth the statistician, the economist, the philosopher, the scholar, the man, they may even be more important."

From the cover: "There can be no doubt of Charles Darwin's major role in the development of modern science and thought. Darwin has become an almost mythical figure in the emergence of modern culture; yet he was by no means the first person to publish evolutionary ideas and his theory of natural selection was not generally accepted by his contemporaries. The publication of the Origin of Species excited much debate and controversy, at once challenging the very foundations of Christian belief, and yet appearing to underpin the Victorian concept of progress and the ability of science to explore areas hitherto obscured by religious dogma. Today Darwin's achievements still evoke powerful and contradictory responses. Bowler's study of Darwin's life and influence combines biography and cultural history."

From the book jacket: "Charles Darwin stands as a towering figure in the history of science, who changed the direction of modern thought by establishing the basis of evolutionary biology. These letters offer a fascinating window into his daily experience, scientific observations, personal concerns and friendships, affording a unique glimpse of Darwin as both naturalist and family man. From his early years at Edinburgh University up to the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, the letters in this volume chart the most ex-citing years of Darwin's life, including the voyage of the Beagle and the subsequent findings which led to his theory of natural selection."

This is the "autobiography" of Julia Bowman Robinson written by her sister, Constance Reid, the well-known biographer of Hilbert, Courant and Neyman. This book is illustrated with previously unpublished material; it also includes three personal articles about Robinson's work by mathematical colleagues. As a matter of interest Julia Robinson, early in her career, worked in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, under Jezy Neyman.
Julia Bowman Robinson wrote: "I think that I have always had a basic liking for the natural numbers. To me they are the one real thing. We can conceive of a chemistry that is different from ours, or a biology, but we cannot conceive of a different mathematics of numbers. What is proved about numbers will be a fact in any universe."

From the book cover: "On March 13, 1964, Feynman delivered a lecture to the Caltech freshman class, "The Motion of Planets Around the Sun"-why the planets move elliptically instead of in perfect circles. For reasons unknown, most probably for his own amusement, he chose to make the argument using mathematics no more advanced than high-school plane geometry. Isaac Newton had pulled off much the same trick nearly 300 years earlier in his masterpiece, the Principia. Feynman, unable to follow Newton's obscure proof, invented his own original, geometrical proof in the Caltech lecture.
"The subject of Feynman's lecture was the watershed discovery that separated the ancient world from the modern world-the culmination of the Scientific Revolution. Before Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton, the universe was Earth-centered. After their discoveries, our idea of the universe steadily altered and expanded, moving outward to the infinity we try to understand in our own time. Thus Feynman deals here with a crowning achievement of the human mind, comparable to Beethoven's symphonies, Shakespeare's plays, or Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Feynman conclusively demonstrates the astonishing fact that has mystified and intrigued all deep thinkers since Newton's time: Nature obeys mathematics."

This new edition of P. Huber's Robust Statistical Procedures is identical to the original; a chapter "Robustness: Where are we now?" has been added.

The main change in the third edition is the addition of computer package solutions to selected examples. These solutions are based on MINITAB, SAS or SPSS and the package solution is compared with the exact solution.
New topics covered include the Lilligors goodness-of-fit test for normal distributions, the non-parametric test and stated confidence interval estimate of the slope of regression line and the rank Von-Neumann test for randomness.

The essays included in this volume look at the uses of statistics in public policy including the spread of AIDS, DNA fingerprinting, censuses. The book is divided into three parts: I. Uses of statistics for description, II. Data Collection, III. Uses of statistics for public policy. The contributors are: H. Chernoff, D.S.C. Chu, S.P. Dresch, S.E. Fienberg, T.B. Jabine, K.R. Janson, N. Keyfitz, L. Kish, W.H. Kruskal, L.E. Moses, F. Mosteller, P. Redfern, A.R. Sampson, S.L. Savage, N.L. Spruill, S.M. Stigler, W.A. Wallis.

From the introduction: "The Tizard Mission was one of the most important events of the Second World War. This study of the mission is an account of technology and its importance for war, and also of diplomacy and the emergence of the great Anglo-American alliance. It is an account of the changing role of the scientists in the military and political decision-making process. The mission was central to the beginning of the story of technological cooperation between the United States, Great Britain, and Canada, which played a crucial role in the defeat of the Axis powers and had ramifications far beyond the end of the war. Yet Sir Henry Tizard's name and the name of the British Technical Mission, which he led to North America in August 1940 have been obscured by the passing of more than fifty years. ...
"The Tizard Mission was of central importance in the history of the Allied scientific war. The war of the scientists was won by the Allies despite notable successes by the Axis powers in such areas as rocketry and torpedo technology. The tactical and strategic ad-vantages that accrued to the Allied armed forces are too numerous to mention, but the most important must be in the field of microwave radar technology and the best known the construction of the atomic bombs. In almost all aspects of this war, either directly or in-directly, some mention must be made of the mission.
"The scientific war was won in large measure by the Allies because they were more successful than their enemies in mobilizing their scientific, technical, and engineering expertise without subverting the basic principles that allowed for the effective use of this talent. As much as possible, they kept external ideological or security considerations to a minimum and did not allow them to hamper the effective pursuit of research. One of the critical factors was the free flow of ideas between scientists in all the countries of the Western Alliance. This was done not as it had been during peacetime, when information was disseminated in journal articles and scholarly conferences, but by a carefully established system of international scientific and technical liaison. The Tizard Mission marked the beginning of scientific and technical cooperation between the United States and Great Britain. The arrival of the mission inaugurated the free and open ex-change of top secret military technology to the great benefit of both countries.
"This exchange was unique in history. Great Britain was at war with Germany and Italy, but the United States was still at peace. There was no formal alliance between Britain and the United States, and the two countries harboured a great deal of mutual suspicion about one another's goals and capabilities. Despite this, they agreed to swap virtually all of their most carefully guarded military technical secrets. Each nation had to overcome deeply ingrained instincts to protect the security of its key weapon systems and research projects. Before the mission, attempts to co-operate had generally been frustrated by mutual fears of lax security and by a chauvinistic belief in the superiority of their respective items of equipment.
"Also distinctive was the vital role played by scientists in the United States and Great Britain in bringing about the policy decisions that allowed the mission to proceed and prosper. Before the Second World War, scientists were not traditionally members of the policy-making teams of governments, especially when discussion concerned fundamental issues of national security. But in the 1930s the Tizard-led Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence changed all this in Great Britain. This committee provided the answer to the bomber menace by developing the Chain Home radar defence system. In doing so, it opened the corridors of power to scientists. The mission played an important role in allowing American civilian scientists, particularly Vannevar Bush, the chairman of the American National Defense Research Committee, to establish a similar influence in their government's decision-making process."

From the book cover: "Take two parts biography, one part autobiography, one part mathematics, one half part philosophy, and one half part fantasy. Mix well, and arrive at a picture of the non-technical side of one mathematician's career. ...
"Mathematical Encounters of the Second Kind is a joyful memoir of the author's encounters, some actual and some fictional, with a number of mathematicians and historical figures. For instance, few people know that Napoleon Bonaparte of France, Lord Rothschild of England, and Queen Hortense of the Netherlands had in common an interest in mathematical talent. Fewer still know the influence that that interest had on their lives and on the lives of others of their respective times... .
"Davis' message is that an interest in mathematics can, like any activity of the human mind, bring people into contact with each other over centuries, over oceans, and over cultural separations. He came to realize that mathematics goes beyond the scientific and technological needs of society, and can serve as a social connection among people of diverse origins, abilities, and stations in life. He turns, in his correspondence and travels, some surprising corners, sharing with us his encounters with a world of academics, politicians, writers, and even spies, all connected through some of the simplest, yet most pro-found ideas in mathematics."

This volume describes science and technology during the years 1950 to 1990. Some of the great scientific presenters of those years are described including J.W. Gibbs, S. Ulam, S. Lifschetz and W. Feller. It also includes the reviews of some books. For example, the book, The Symmetric Group, by B.E. Sugar. "A reasonable, readable, rational, reasonable, romantic, rounded, respectable, remarkable, repertoire of results on a range that has rarely been so highly recognized."

The collection contains approximately five hundred and fifty quotations by and about Albert Einstein. The quotations are sorted by subject.

This volume discusses the research activities of the tobacco industry and documents the disparity between what the tobacco industry knew and what it said about the dangers of cigarettes.

The author documents the perception and reality of the relative worth of research, administration and teaching in universities by applying an economic model to the demands of the economic markets.

The life of Thomas Platter (1499-1582) and his sons is described, based on his autobiographical writings. The account shows the customs, perceptions and character of an age at the threshold of modernity.

From the book jacket: "Depending upon and interacting with colleagues and competitors, scientists build their careers and power within communities of their peers. To understand scientists and the institutions they construct (such as the reward system), one must first unravel the complex structures and relation-ships that define scientific communities.
"In this collective biography of the more than 1,200 individuals who engaged in astronomical research, teaching, or practice in the United States between 1859 and 1940, [the author] paints a detailed portrait of this scientific community. ...
"Drawing on more than a decade of archival research and quantitative analysis, [the author] presents his data in concise tables and figures yet takes care, through biographical sketches, to focus on the human beings the data represent. This dual approach convincingly illustrates how the changing structure of a scientific community can alter both the career trajectories of its members and the nature of the scientific research they choose to pursue."

The first volume of A. Desmond's biography of Huxley was published in 1994. [Noted in Short Book Reviews, Vol. 15, p.30.] Thomas Henry Huxley was born May 1, 1825 and died June 29, 1895. The first volume, subtitled "The Devil's Disciple" ended with Huxley's presidency of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In the second volume, Huxley become a Privy Councillor to the Queen.
From the book jacket: "Touching the crowning heights and crushing depths, this is the epic story of the first 'agnostic' (Huxley coined the word) whose life summed up the social changes from the early Victorian to the modern age. Written with enormous zest and passion, vast in its conception, and based on a reading of 5,000 letters, Huxley: Evolution's High Priest is about the making of our modern Darwinian world."

From the book jacket: "The ills of education are caused, K. Egan argues, by the fact that we have inherited three major educational ideas, each of which is incompatible with the other two. Is the purpose of education to make good citizens and inculcate socially relevant skills and values? Or is it to master certain bodies of knowledge? Or is it the fulfilment of each student's unique potential? These conflicting goals bring about clashes at every level of the educational process, from curriculum decisions to teaching methods. Egan's analysis is cool, clear, and wholly original, and his diagnosis is as convincing as it is unexpected."

The author looks at a number of silicon microworlds and shows how they are being used to formulate new theories and to solve practical problems.

The topics extended in the second edition are: "independence/dependence/exchangeability properties of sets of random events and random variables, characterization of probability distributions, the moment problem, martingales and limit theorems. Clearer interpretations of many statements and improvements in presentation have been made in all sections."

From the book jacket: "Celestial Encounters is for anyone who has ever wondered about the foundations of chaos. In 1888, the 34-year-old Henri Poincaré submitted a paper that was to change the course of science, but not before it underwent significant changes itself. `The Three-Body Problem and the Equations of Dynamics' won a prize sponsored by King Oscar II of Sweden and Norway and the journal Acta Mathematica, but after accepting the prize, Poincaré found a serious mistake in his work. While correcting it, he discovered the phenomenon of chaos.
"Starting with the story of Poincaré's work, Florin Diacu and Philip Holmes trace the history of attempts to solve the problems of celestial mechanics first posed in Isaac Newton's Principia in 1686. In describing how mathematical rigor was brought to bear on one of our oldest fascinations-the motions of the heavens-they introduce the people whose ideas led to the flourishing field now called non-linear dynamics.
"In presenting the modern theory of dynamical systems, the models underlying much of modern science are described pictorially, using the geometrical language invented by Poincaré. More generally, the authors reflect on mathematical creativity and the roles that chance encounters, politics, and circumstance play in it."

From the back cover: "Can the electric and magnetic fields (EMF) to which people are routinely exposed cause health effects? This volume assesses the data and draws conclusions about the consequences of human exposure to EMF. The committee examines what is known about three kinds of health effects associated with EMF: cancer, primarily childhood leukaemia; reproduction and development; and neurobiological effects. This book provides a detailed discussion of hazard identification, dose-response assessment, exposure assessment, and risk characterization for each.
"Possible Health Effects of Exposure to Residential Electric and Magnetic Fields also discusses the tools available to measure exposure, common types of exposures, and what is known about the effects of expo-sure. The committee looks at correlations between EMF exposure and carcinogenesis, mutagenesis, neurobehavioral effects, reproductive and developmental effects, effects of melatonin and other neurochemicals, and effects on bone healing and stimulated cell growth."

From the book cover: "This book provides a solution to the ecological inference problem, which has plagued users of statistical methods for over seventy-five years: How can researchers reliably infer individual-level behavior from aggregate (ecological) data? In political science, this question arises when individual-level surveys are unavailable (for instance, local or comparative electoral politics), unreliable (racial politics), insufficient (political geography), or infeasible (political history). The ecological inference problem also confronts researchers in numerous areas of major significance in public policy, and other academic disciplines, ranging from epidemiology and marketing to sociology and quantitative history. Although many have attempted to make such cross-level inferences, scholars agree that all existing methods yield very inaccurate conclusions about the world. In this volume, Gary King lays out a unique-and reliable- solution to this venerable problem."

The author focuses on the question of "how certainty is constructed or deconstructed" which takes in the views of medical researchers, activists, policy makers, and others.
He shows that AIDS has been a social and political phenomenon, that the knowledge about AIDS has not followed the usual methods of science. AIDS re-search has been broad, public and contested.

From the book jacket: "Science is very successful in discovering the structure and history of the physical world. However, there is more to be told of the encounter with reality, including the nature of scientific inquiry itself, than can be gained from im-personal experience and experimental test alone. Beyond Science considers the human context in which science operates and pursues that wider understanding which we all seek. It looks to issues of meaning and value, intrinsic to scientific practice but excluded from science's consideration by its own self-denying ordinance. The author raises the question of the significance of the deep mathematical intelligibility of the physical world and its anthropically fruitful history. He considers how we may find responsible ways to use the power that science places in human hands. Science is portrayed as an activity of individuals, pursued within a convivial and truth-seeking community.
"This book neither overvalues science (as if it were the only worthwhile source of knowledge) nor devalues it (as if it were to be treated with suspicion or not taken seriously). Rather, Beyond Science provides a considered and balanced account that firmly asserts science's place in human culture, maintained in mutually illuminating relationships with other aspects of that culture."

In Imagined Worlds, the author helps the readers to see themselves and the world from a scientist's point of view and shows us in what direction science and technology whether real or imagined may go.

From the book cover: "The work of the distinguished astrophysicist S. Chandrasekhar is notable as much for its breadth as its diversity; his practice was to change the focus of his research from time to time to pursue new areas. This volume, conceived by Chandrasekhar as a supplement to his Selected Papers, contains in Part I the record of his work with Valeria Ferrari in the final years of his life on the non-radial oscillations of stars. In her foreword to Part I, Ferrari discusses their collaboration, begun in 1990 and continued until the week before Chandrasekhar's death at age 84.
"The second half of the book, introduced with a foreword by Lalitha Chandrasekhar, contains various essays, articles, and short pieces on the themes that Chandrasekhar had addressed in Truth and Beauty, with meditations on the aesthetics of science and the world it examines, as well as several contributions to the history of astronomy. Highlights include: "The Series Painting of Claude Monet and the Landscape of General Relativity," "The Perception of Beauty and the Pursuit of Science," "On Reading Newton's Principia at Age Past Eighty," and personal recollections of Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and others.
"Selected Papers, Volume 7 paints a picture of Chandrasekhar's universe, filled with stars and galaxies, but with space for poetics, paintings, and politics."

From the back cover: "The letters that Ramanujan wrote to G.H. Hardy on January 16 and February 27, 1913 are two of the most famous letters in the history of mathematics. These and other letters introduced Ramanujan and his remarkable theorems to the world and stimulated much research, especially in the 1920s and the 1930s. This book brings together many letters to, from, and about Ramanujan. The letters came from the National Archives in Delhi, the Archives in the State of Tamil Nadu, and a variety of other sources. Helping to orient the reader is the extensive commentary, both mathematical and cultural, by Bernt and Rankin; in particular, they discuss in detail the history, up to the present day, of each mathematical result in the letters. Containing many letters that have never been published before, this book will appeal to those interested in Ramanujan's mathematics as well as those wanting to learn more about the personal side of his life."

From the book jacket: " `I have discovered a truly marvellous proof, which this margin is too narrow to contain... .' With these tantalising words the seventeenth-century French mathematician Pierre de Fermat threw down the gauntlet to future generations. Fermat's last theorem looked simple enough for a child to solve, yet the finest mathematical minds would be baffled by the search for the proof.
"Over three hundred and fifty years were to pass before a mild-mannered Englishman finally cracked the mystery in 1995. Fermat by then was far more than a theorem. Whole lives had been devoted to the quest for a solution. There was Sophie Germain, who had to take on the identity of a man to conduct research in a field forbidden to females. The dashing Evariste Galois scribbled down the results of his research deep into the night before sauntering out to die in a duel. The Japanese genius Yutaka Taniyama killed himself in despair, while the German industrialist Paul Wolfskehl claimed Fermat had saved him from suicide.
"Andrew Wiles had dreamed of proving Fermat ever since he first read about the theorem as a boy of ten in his local library. Whilst the hopes of others had been dashed, his dream was destined to come true C but only after years of toil and frustration, of exhilarating breakthrough and crashing disappointment. The true story of how mathematics' most challenging problem was made to yield up its secretes is a thril-ling tale of endurance, ingenuity and inspiration."

From the introduction: "This anthology gathers together primary sources on the development of game theory C the analysis of conflict and cooperation as games of strategy C from its beginnings until 1960. The primary sources collected here serve as a companion work to Volume I of our History of Game Theory entitled From the Beginnings to 1945 (Routlege, 1996) and the as-yet unwritten second volume, as well as to recent work on the history of game theory by other scholars, notably Robert J. Leonard and Christian Schmidt. It also serves as a convenient repository of primary sources for those fascinated by accounts of early work in Luce and Raiffa (1957) and Shubik (1982). Such early contributors as Edgeworth, Richardson and Lanchester were not aware that their writings were later to become known as game theory, which came to be recognized as a distinct field only in 1944 with the publication of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Only in retrospect were their close links to later developments recognized, whereupon Edgeworth market games, Richardson process models of the arms race and Lanchester games took their place in the literature of game theory. By 1960, after the fourth and last volume of Contributions to the Theory of Games had appeared in the Annals of Mathematics Studies, game theory was established as a recognized specialization in mathematics and economics, with promising applications in fields ranging from political science to biology. Within another 20 or so years, game theory had transformed both microeconomic theory and industrial organization."

This volume in honor of Samuel Kotz has contributions from many. The volume tries to cover the breadth of Kotz's interests. It is divided into eleven parts: 1. Samuel Kotz, 2. Statistics in the World, 3. Models, 4. Biostatistics, 5. Testing and Estimation, 6. Univariate Distributions, 7. Multivariate Distributions, 8. Characterizations, 9. Probability, 10. Bayes Theory, 11. Descriptive.

riginal 1982-1989; Volume 1 reviewed in Short Book Reviews, Vol. 2, p.13.]

This is the first of three volumes to be published as an update of the Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences. The entries are written by the editors and experts in the field and are of the latest topics or those left out of the original volumes.

From the preface: "This book discusses conceptual and pragmatic issues in the assessment of statistical knowledge, reasoning skills, and dis-positions of students in diverse contexts of instruction, both at the college and precollege levels. It is designed primarily for academic audiences interested in the teaching and learning of statistics and mathematics and for those involved in teacher education and training in diverse contexts."

This volume arose from the International Conference on Survey Management and Process Quality held in April 1995. The volume is divided into five parts: A. Questionnaire design, B. Data collection, C. Post survey processing and operations, D. Quality assessment and control, E. Error effects on estimation, analyses and interpretation.

From the preface: "The major changes in this edition are a new Chapter 3 on bootstrapping, substantial changes to the chapters on analysis of variance and regression (now Chapters 7 and 8), a new Chapter 13 on survival and growth data, a new Chapter 15 on Bayesian methods, and a new appendix on computer soft-ware. To accommodate some of the extra material the Fortran subroutines that were included in the first edition have been removed. The word 'bootstrap' has been added to the title to reflect the new emphasis in this area."

The main addition to the second edition is a new chapter on linear models and exogenous variables. There are also several new additions to various chapters.

Title	LONGITUDE. The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.
Author	D. Sobel.
Publisher	London: Fourth Estate, 1996, pp. viii + 184, Ł12.99.

Title	THE OTHERS. How Animals Made Us Human.
Author	P. Shepard.
Publisher	Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996, pp. x + 374, US$24.95.

Title	THE FORGOTTEN POLLINATORS.
Author	S.L. Buchmann and G.P. Nabhan.
Publisher	Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996, pp. xx + 292, US$25.00.

Title	DISEASE AND CLASS. Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society.
Author	G.D. Feldberg.
Publisher	New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995, pp. xiii + 274.

Title	THE THREAD OF LIFE. The Story of Genes and Genetic Engineering.
Author	S. Aldridge.
Publisher	Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. vii + 258, Ł16.95/US$24.95.