Some great recommendations and thoughts from Douglas W. MacDougal:
My father showed me a comet through his binoculars after dinner when I was six. I remember seeing that ghostly wisp from another time, suspended in space, hung among the stars. Years later, as a middle school student in Florida, our librarian displayed a copy of Newton’s Principia on a stand in the library. It was laid open to pages of intriguing, complex-looking geometrical drawings, including Newton’s dramatic illustration of a comet. I flipped through it every time I passed by, amazed to discover that things I saw in the sky could be known through the language of mathematics, a fact that still endlessly inspires me.
My father showed me a comet through his binoculars after dinner when I was six. I remember seeing that ghostly wisp from another time, suspended in space, hung among the stars. Years later, as a middle school student in Florida, our librarian displayed a copy of Newton’s Principia on a stand in the library. It was laid open to pages of intriguing, complex-looking geometrical drawings, including Newton’s dramatic illustration of a comet. I flipped through it every time I passed by, amazed to discover that things I saw in the sky could be known through the language of mathematics, a fact that still endlessly inspires me.