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On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres  was written by Nicolaus Copernicus, and was the book that started the heliocentric revolution in Europe. This was my second time reading this book, the first time being last year for a project I did. I reread it because I felt that I may not have understood the book to its fullest when I read it as a subbie, and felt like I would be able to grasp the concepts better now that I am a freshman. I can firmly say that I did, and I these are the reasons I would recommend this book to any of my classmates. 1. It shows us the basic proof for heliocentrism. Heliocentrism is the idea that the sun is at the center of the solar system, which is almost the opposite of geocentrism, the belief that the earth is at the center. I'm going to make an assumption and say that everyone who reads this blogpost takes the idea that the earth revolves around the sun as a basic fact and assumes it to be true. That makes perfect sense, it almost feels like it

Recently, I read The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict , which is the prequel to The Mysterious Benedict Society series. I know it is probably tiring to have back-to-back blog posts on the same series, but this book is like an optional prequel. In the The Mysterious Benedict Society series, the main characters are these really smart kids, each with individual talents. However, they work with Mr. Benedict, who oversees the actions of the children. The main series books (there are 4) don’t really cover much about Mr. Benedict’s past or background, but The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict is solely about Mr. Benedict, specifically his childhood.  In the book, Nicholas Benedict, a nine year old, is transferred to a different orphanage called Rothschild’s End, an understaffed, underfunded orphanage where the kids are assigned double the “normal” amount of chores. Unfortunately for Nicholas, he has a rare, untreatable serious condition called narcolepsy which ca

The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of The Genius Ramanujan is a fascinating biography of the early 20th-century Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. It's both the story of his life and also the history of mathematics and scientific discoveries during the time period, spanning from the end of the 19th-century through World War I. What makes him different from many mathematicians in history is that he never received any formal training, and claimed that his insights were inspired by the family goddess he worshiped. Ramanujan was one of the most brilliant mathematicians to have ever lived and his story is just as fascinating as his discoveries. The story starts off with Ramanujan's bringing up in Kumbakonam, a small town in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India. A prominent center of both European and Indian education during the British Raj, it was known as the "Cambridge of south India". The book does delve into a lot of the history of Madras and Kumbakonam,