Fw: January meeting of the Delaware Astronomical Society Book Club

[stev...@verizon.net]

Happy New Year!

Attached is some information from the Delaware Astronomical Society Book Club that you may be interested in.

Clear Skies 

Steve J

Sent from the all new AOL app for iOS

Begin forwarded message:

On Thursday, January 1, 2026, 12:10 PM, BarbDon Knabb <barb...@gmail.com> wrote:

Greetings MERAL Presidents, ALCors, editors, officers and others,

Below is an invitation to the January meeting of the Delaware Astronomical Society Book Club.

Please share this invitation with your club members. 

The Zoom link will be sent a few days before the meeting.

Clear skies,

Don Knabb

MERAL Chair

FROM THE DELAWARE ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY:

You and your guests are cordially invited to attend the January meeting of the Delaware Astronomical Society Book Club on Thursday, January 29, 2026, at 7 PM Eastern Time Via Zoom. The Zoom link will be emailed the week of the meeting.

We will discuss Vector: A Surprising Story of Space, Time, and Mathematical Transformation  By Robin Arianrhod PhD

 Dr. Arianrhod will join us for our discussion.  DAS and AAA Member, Greg McNiff, will lead the meeting.

"At its core, the story I’ll tell here is about the evolution of the way we humans record and make sense of all the data that swirl around us. In particular, I’ll explore the dramatic mathematical transformations that gave us the remarkable concepts called “vectors” and “tensors,” for they underlie so much of modern science—and much of our technology, too. They are languages that have helped us uncover mysteries of the universe as if we were gods. One reason for this awesome power is that vectors and tensors made it possible to handle the dimensions of space in a new and transparent way—and this, in turn, made it possible to discover new laws of nature, and new technological applications of these laws. Anytime you want to utilize locations in space you need to handle these dimensions—rotating a robot arm, say, or designing a bridge or wind turbine; figuring out the effect of an electromagnetic force in a motor or generator, say, or predicting the path of an electromagnetic wave, a water wave, or even a gravitational wave; plotting the trajectory of a satellite or calibrating a guidance system such as GPS; or just about anything you need to analyze in space or space-time. We’ll see in more detail the physical power of vectors and tensors as the story unfolds. But these languages are not just about physical dimensions—they’re about “dimensions” of information, too. You’ve likely read about “big data” and the information revolution, but it is vectors and tensors that help make data usable and comprehensible—the way the periodic table of chemical elements is both an organizational and theoretical tool in chemistry, except that the math in our story is so much more widely applicable."

Table of Contents

Prologue
1. The Liberation of Algebra
2. The Arrival of Calculus
3. Ideas for Vectors
4. Understanding Space (and Storage)
5. A Surprising New Player and a Very Slow Reception
6. Tait and Maxwell: Hatching the Electromagnetic Vector Field
7. The Slow Journey from Quaternions to Vectors
8. Vector Analysis at Last—and a “War” over Quaternions
9. From Space to Space-Time: A New Twist for Vectors
10. Curving Spaces and Invariant Distances: On the Way to Tensors
11. Inventing Tensors—and Why They Matter
12. Everything Comes Together: Tensors and the General Theory of Relativity
13. What Happened Next
Epilogue
Timeline

Mary Webb

Delaware Astronomical Society Librarian