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Facing the World

The Evolutionary Invention of the Oriented Body

An essay in twenty chapters on the branch of the tree of life we inhabit: the bilateral animals. Why does an animal have a front? Why are most built around a single axis, with a mouth at one end and a gut running through to the other? Why do senses and brain gather at the leading end? Tracing the story from the Burgess Shale back through the Cambrian and forward through a cascade of inventions — through-gut, head, coelom, segmentation, skeletons, walking, the warm body — the book argues that bilaterality is the widest answer ever found to a single problem: how to extract energy from the world.

9,99 €

The Language of Creation

Why Physics Generates Mathematics

A philosophical essay on what contemporary mathematics and physics become when they are viewed as two methods of access to a single structure. Around three cases (mirror symmetry, the Langlands-gauge correspondence, renormalisation as Galois theory), and closing with a meditation on a page of Borges, the book argues that physics has been generating, for sixty years, the deepest mathematics — and that this is not an accident.

9,99 €

The Letter

Robert Langlands and the Dictionary of Worlds

In January 1967, at Princeton, the Canadian mathematician Robert Langlands wrote his senior colleague André Weil seventeen handwritten pages sketching a precise correspondence between two mathematical worlds that seemed to have nothing in common. That letter became, over the decades, one of the most ambitious research programs of the twentieth century. This book tells what was in it, and what it took for the letter to be right — through to the proof of 2024.

9,99 €

The Apocalypse According to Galois

The Revelation of Hidden Symmetries

On the night of 29 May 1832, in Paris, Évariste Galois, twenty years old, writes a letter to his friend Auguste Chevalier: he is to fight a duel at dawn and senses he will not come back. The pages he leaves behind, long illegible and then slowly understood, contain the outline of a new language — the language of symmetries — destined to reveal the deep unity of mathematics. This book tells what was in those pages, and what two centuries have done to understand them.

9,99 €