Books in Flashes of Genius series

Like nobody before or since, Leonardo da Vinci united both the arts and the sciences. He was not only a painter and skilled draftsman, but also an inventor and tireless researcher. His art, including the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, remain classics of Western civilization. And though he lived 500 years ago, many of his futuristic ideas, such as the contact lens and the armored vehicle, are still with us today. Leonardo da Vinci and the Pen That Drew the Future tells the story of the greatest thinker of the Renaissance.

Albert Einstein wasn’t afraid to think for himself. Working as a clerk in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, he wrote papers with fantastical theories—that light is both a wave and a particle; that matter can become energy, and energy can become matter; that space can “bend,” and time is relative. His revolutionary theories turned the world of physics upside down, and earned him a Nobel Prize. Einstein and the Time Machine tells the story of one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, as well as the basics of his Theory of Relativity.

In the late 1600s, science was still in its infancy. But that changed in 1687 when professor Isaac Newton published a book describing three laws of motion as well as a theory of universal gravitation. He also came up with a brand new field of mathematics, called calculus, to explain it all. The same equations that described the motion of a falling apple could also be used to describe the orbit of planets around the sun. It was revolutionary! Newton and the Antigravity Formula tells the story of the man who launched the field of modern physics and changed the way humans look at the world around them.

When Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, he shocked the world. In it he claimed that humans were just another animal species that had evolved from more primitive life forms. Years earlier, Darwin had collected thousands of animal specimens during a five-year voyage around the world, specimens that he used to make his case for biologic evolution through natural selection. Darwin and the True Story of the Dinosaurs tells the story of the brilliant naturalist who changed humankind's understanding of its origins.