Zweig, Paul. The Heresy of Self-Love. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980.
15 A page from Leibniz's copy of Descartes' secret notebook. Courtesy of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library, Hanover, Germany.
18 The Descartes family mansion in Chatellerault. Courtesy of Debra Gross Aczel.
19 Descartes' grandmother's house. Courtesy of Debra Gross Aczel. 65 Temple at Delos. Courtesy Tzeli Hadjidimitriou, Athens, Greece.
149 Anatomical drawing. Courtesy of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library, Hanover, Germany.
170 Princess Elizabeth © NTPL/John Hammond/The Image Works. 190 Queen Christina of Sweden with Descartes/Dumensil © Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource.
201 Descartes' skull. Courtesy of Debra Gross Aczel. 224 Kepler's model of the universe (from Mysterium cosmographicum, 1596), from the collection of Jay M. Pasachoff. Courtesy of Wayne G. Hammond, Chapin Library, Williams College.
226 The page from Leibniz's copy of Descartes' secret notebook. Courtesy of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library, Hanover, Germany.
240—41 Cosmological models of the universe based on Platonic solids. Courtesy of Jeff Weeks.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amir D. Aczel, Ph.D., is a mathematician and the author of twelve books, including the international bestseller Fermat's Last Theorem, which was nominated for a Los Angeies Times Book Prize and has been translated into nineteen languages. Aczel has appeared on over thirty television programs, including the CBS Evening News and ABC's Nightiine, on CNN and CNBC, and on over a hundred radio programs, including NPR's Weekend Edition and Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. In 2004 Aczel was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a visiting scholar in the history of science at Harvard.
PUBLISHED BY BROADWAY BOOKS
Copyright © 2005 by Amir D. Aczel
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.broadwaybooks.com.
BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Aczel, Amir D.
Descartes' secret notebook : a true tale of mathematics, mysticism, and the quest to
understand the universe / Amir D. Aczel.
p. cm.
1. Descartes, Rene, 1596-1650—Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc. 2. Descartes, Rene,
15 96-165 0—Knowledge—Mathematics. 3. Mathematics—Philosophy—History—
17th century. 4. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von, 1646-1716—Manuscripts.
I. Title.
QA29.D55A25 2005
S10M—dc22
2005045722
eISBN: 978-0-307-49480-1
v3.0
Descartes's Secret Notebook Page 24