understanding of nature through spiritual contemplation and the Renaissance's revolutionary efforts to forge an awareness by observing and exploring the physical world. The author brings to life such figures as the Ionian exile Pythagoras, who developed the mathematical language by which we apprehend the intrinsic order of nature; al-Khwarizmi, court mathematician in the ninth century who developed the Arabic numerals; Roger Bacon, the Franciscan teacher and thinker who foresaw the machine age with stunning, prophetic vision; Dominican Albertus Magnus, whose studies of plant and animal life—made during long travels barefoot across northern Europe—laid the foundations of major empirical sciences; the aged astronomer and geographer Paolo Toscanelli, who measured the path of the sun on a cathedral floor and whose letter to Columbus launched the discovery of the New World; Leonardo da Vinci, the lonely genius of science and art, who personified the Renaissance, and its fascination with life itself. Across the centuries, Goldstein guides the reader through a shining intellectual pageant in a way that is both illuminating and unforgettable.

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