Books by Pickover, Clifford A.
- Pickover, Clifford A. Black Holes: A Traveler's
Guide. New York: John Wiley & Sons,
1998. ISBN 0-471-19704-1.
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October 2001 
- Pickover, Clifford A.
The Loom of God.
New York: Perseus Books, 1997.
ISBN 0-306-45411-4.
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Clifford Pickover has more than enough imagination for a
hundred regular people. An
enormously prolific author, his work includes technical books on computing
and scientific visualisation, science fiction, and popular works on
mathematics and a wide variety of scientific topics. This book
explores the boundary between mathematics and religion, including
Pythagorean cults, Stonehenge, cave paintings from 20,000 years ago
which may be the first numbers, the Kabala, the quipu of the Incas,
numerology, eschatology, and real-world doomsday scenarios, along
with a wide variety of puzzles in number theory, geometry, and other
mathematical topics. One of the many fascinating unsolved problems he discusses
is the “integer brick”, which seems to be more often
referred to as the “perfect cuboid”: can you find a
three-dimensional rectangular parallelopiped in which all the edges and face
and space diagonals are integers? Computer
searches have shown than no cuboid with a smallest edge less than
1,281,000,000 satisfies this requirement but, who knows, you may find
it in just a few more compute cycles! (I'll pass on this one, after
spending three years
of computer time pursuing another unicorn of recreational
mathematics.) As with Pickover's other popular books, this one includes
source code for programs to explore topics raised in the text,
explanation of the science and history behind the science fiction
narrative, and extensive literature citations for those interested in
digging deeper.
March 2005
- Pickover, Clifford A. The Science of Aliens. New York:
Basic Books, 1998. ISBN 0-465-07315-8.
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August 2003
- Pickover, Clifford A. Surfing through
Hyperspace. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999. ISBN 0-19-514241-1.
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October 2001
- Pickover, Clifford A. Time: A Traveler's Guide. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-19-513096-0.
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May 2002