Prime Obsession
by John Derbyshire | 
Disturbing the Universe
by Freeman Dyson | 
Men Of Mathematics
by Eric Temple Bell | 
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot | 
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
by Richard P. Feynman | 
Rocket Men
by Robert Kurson | 
The Invention of Nature
by Andrea Wulf |
E=mc2
by David Bodanis |
The Knife Man
by Wendy Moore | 
Quantum
by Manjit Kumar | 
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming
by Mike Brown | 
The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla
by Nikola Tesla | 
Vaccinated
by Paul A. Offit |
Euler
by William Dunham | 
The Emperor of Scent
by Chandler Burr | 
The Wizard and the Prophet
by Charles C. Mann | 
The Clockwork Universe
by Edward Dolnick |
Brighter than a Thousand Suns
by Robert Jungk | 
Rosalind Franklin
by Brenda Maddox | 
A Mathematician's Apology
by G. H. Hardy |
Although Einstein was the greatest genius of the twentieth century, many of his ground-breaking discoveries were blighted by mistakes, ranging from serious misconceptions in physics to blatant errors in mathematics. For instance, Einstein's first theoretical proof of the famous formula E = mc2 was incomplete and only approximately valid; he struggled with this problem for many years, but he never found a complete proof (better mathematicians did). In this provocative forensic biography, Hans C. Ohanian dissects this and other mistakes and places them in the context of Einstein's turbulent life and times. Einstein was often navigating in a fog of irrational and mystical inspirations, but his profound intuition about physics permitted him to reach his goal despite-and sometimes because of-the mistakes he made along the way. Einstein's uncanny ability to use his mistakes subconsciously as stepping stones toward his revolutionary theories was one hallmark of his genius.