I’ve been fascinated by Chemistry since the age of 13-14. At that time I noticed organic formulae on the blackboard of a higher school class and was curious about what they meant. So I asked my mother to bring me a book about Chemistry from a library and she brought a school textbook about Inorganic Chemistry. I read it in a few weeks and proceeded to reading a textbook about Organic Chemistry. At the same time I found in a local library 10 volumes of The Feynman Lectures on Physics (in Russian translation) and started reading the first volumes on classical mechanics and learnt about calculus. Another popular book about Quantum Chemistry raised my curiosity in Quantum Mechanics and Morris Kline’s The Loss of Certainty book (in Russian translation) made me interested in abstract mathematics and its logical and set-theoretical foundations including Gödel’s theorems and intuitionistic mathematics. All this happened before the age of 16 and in one evening when I was reading a Linear Algebra textbook an idea struck me to represent certain aspects of Inorganic Chemistry formalisms like Periodic Table and empirical formulas of chemical compounds as linear vector spaces of element vectors over the field of numbers.
Now OpenTask is going to publish its first popular science book called:
Vector Space Chemistry (ISBN: 978-1906717551)
with a preface written after 25 years since the discovery of this mathematical model and formalization of Chemistry.
A note for cautious readers: I’m aware about over-excessive application of mathematics in sciences, especially after reading these books:
Fashionable Nonsense and Social Sciences as Sorcery
My book is just a popular science book that explains some chemical and abstract mathematical concepts and provides an example of using Mathematics as a modeling and formalization tool for Chemistry.
- Dmitry Vostokov @ DumpAnalysis.org -
