Buffon: A Life in Natural History (Cornell History of Science)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.38 (652 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0801429188 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 512 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2018-02-20 |
| Language | : | French |
DESCRIPTION:
Just as today scientists tend to look down on popularizers of their specialty such as Carl Sagan, Buffon was derided by his fellow scientists, and interest in his work soon waned. Medical Ctr. Lib., Durham, N.C.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. The reader will also learn a lot about Enlightenment science. . Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries.?Eric D. Albright, Duke Univ. From Library Journal Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, was an outstanding scientist in 18th-century France with a flair for publicity and grand public debates on a wide variety of topics now called natural science. In fact, Buffon began a significant amount of research that eventually led to
"Not what it could have been" according to Adrian Heathcote. This book is a bit of a disappointment. It is described on the front flap as 'magisterial' and the life's work of Jacques Roger, but ultimately it comes up short. After all, the one thing that Buffon is famous for is Buffon's Needle, the brilliant combination of ideas in differential geometry and probability, that initiated the whole area of what is now called geometric probability. Yet in Roger's biography it is barely mentioned: he gives it just one half page, and no analysis. Laplace, who corrected Buffon's calculation, is not mentioned at all in this context. Roger even seems unaware that Buffon's N
This biography, the life work of Jacques Roger, finally gives Buffon his due. His studies of plant life led to his creation of a renowned nursery, his zoological interests to his development of an aviary and menagerie. Using Buffon's enormous literary production as the major source of insight into his and his age's beliefs about the natural world, the book is both a biography and an analytical discussion of Buffon's science.Wonderful illustrations of assorted animals, taken from early editions of Buffon's Natural History, make this intellectual extravaganza a visual delight as well.. The appearance in English of this magisterial biography is a major publishing event. Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707-1788), was perhaps the most important of Charles Darwin's predecessors, Director of the Royal Botanical Garden, and certainly the premier French scientist of the Enlightenment. His massive, thirty-six-volume System of Nature was the most widely collected work of the Enlightenment, reaching more readers than even the classics of Voltaire and Rousseau. Buffon conducted a broad range of experiments, from the burning effects of the sun's rays, t