I purchased this book with the intent of learning something significant about Boltzmann's personal life, about the context in which he made his discoveries. I found the prose to be cumbersome and the structure of the chapters to be poorly thought out.



the author repeatedly falls into the trap of including too much information, while failing to succinctly capture the big idea - which remains obscured. while the book is technically adept, it adds little to the overall presentation, as the mathematics is wrapped with poorly edited and badly structured prose. the technical portions of the text are then insufficient to serve as a complete technical explanation on boltzmann's ideas while distracting from the point of the biography.



with so much great writing out there it is hard to justify time and money spent on a book so poorly written.