Mauri Valtonen

Valtonen, Mauri, Joanna Anosova, Konstantin Kholshevnikov, Aleksandr Mylläri, Victor Orlov, and Kiyotaka Tanikawa. The Three-body Problem from Pythagoras to Hawking. Springer, 2016.
The Three-Body Problem is a general history of one of the most intriguing puzzles in mathematics and celestial mechanics. First, a disclaimer. I am the sort of general reader whose mathematical education is mostly from high school and is decades old. Yet, I was able to follow most of the discussion here and understand more than I did about why making predictions about the movements of three or more related bodies in space was so difficult and important to everything from understanding the history and future of the cosmos to flying to the moon to the navigation systems in our automobiles. It was clear, especially from the book’s later chapters, that three body issues are still producing much research and some controversy. Even at the tender age for four years, the book may be a little dated. Neural network solutions to the problem were announced in 2019, and Liu Cixin’s novel The Three-Body Problem will soon be a series on Netflix. Even the human drama continues as one of the producers of the series was recently murdered, apparently by a corporate rival. Science is never dull.… (altro)