Denis Guedj
Personal Information
Description
Denis Guedj was a French novelist and a professor of the History of Science at Paris VIII University. He spent many years devising courses and games to teach adults and children math. -- Wikipedia Photo Attribution: Photographe de la Ville de Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, dans le cadre de sa mission ; scan par Ji-Elle, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Books
Le théorème du perroquet
"When Mr. Ruche, a reclusive Parisian bookseller, receives a letter from a long lost friend in the Amazon bequesting him a vast library of mathematical books, he is propelled into a great exploration of the story of maths, from brilliant Greek thinkers, such as Archimedes and Pythagoras, to the modern-day genius Fermat.". "Meanwhile Max, a deaf boy whose dysfunctional family live with Mr. Ruche, finds a voluble parrot in a local fleamarket. He turns out to be a bird who discusses maths with anyone who will listen. So when Mr. Ruche learns of his friend's mysterious death in the rainforests of Brazil he decides that with the parrot's help he will use these books to teach Max and his twin brother and sister the mysteries of Euclid's Elements, Pythagoras' Theorem and the countless other wonders of numbers and shapes.". "But soon it becomes clear that Mr. Ruche has inherited the library for reasons other than pure enlightenment, and before he knows it the household are caught up in a race to prevent vital theorems falling into the wrong hands."--BOOK JACKET.
La Méridienne
"On June 24, 1792, two large traveling coaches left the Tuileries, one headed to Dunkirk, the other to Barcelona. They carried the astronomers Pierre Mechain and Jean-Baptiste Delambre, who had been ordered by the French revolutionary government to survey the meridian that passes through both cities and divide it to create a natural and universal unit of measure, the meter.". "The Measure of the World is the story of this mission. Denis Guedj has written a novelistic account of the measurement project that relies heavily on archival sources - a more "traditional" history could not possibly describe how a sober scientific enterprise became a journey filled with adventures and experiences so bizarre as to be hardly credible. In tumultuous revolutionary and postrevolutionary France, Mechain and Delambre were objects of suspicion as they traveled through the provinces, climbing steeples and deploying strange instruments - they were detained as spies, taken for charlatans or fleeing royalists, and arrested for debt. Their perilous labors lasted until 1799, when the meter was formally established."--BOOK JACKET.