Concentration - (101 Collection) by Frederick R Adler (Paperback)

About the Book

How are weather systems, works of art, cities, and human relationships connected? In Concentration, Frederick R. Adler explores a powerful idea that links science, culture, and everyday life. Through engaging examples and interdisciplinary insights, he reveals how patterns of activity and inactivity shape both the world around us and the experiences that matter most.

Book Synopsis

The concept of concentration offers a surprising lens through which to understand the world. From biology and physics to economics, sports, culture, and the arts, concentration describes how behaviours of activity emerge alongside those of inactivity. These patterns not only shape natural phenomena but also the ways we seek meaning, beauty, connection, and purpose.

In this wide-ranging and accessible exploration, Frederick R. Adler introduces concentration as a unifying concept that connects seemingly disparate outcomes. Drawing on examples from science, culture, and everyday life, Adler demonstrates how concentration helps explain the formation of cities, the dynamic of weather, the structure of artistic expression, and the ways people create value, identity, and community.

Building on decades of work in mathematical biology and a longstanding commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry, Adler reveals how diverse phenomena share common underlying patterns. Along the way, he examines why repetition gives art its power, how abstraction creates meaning, why cities flourish, and how concentration shapes some of the most intimate aspects of human experience, including love, aging, and death.

Written in a lively and engaging style, Concentration invites readers to see the world through a new lens, uncovering connections among the sciences, the humanities, and everyday life. It offers a fresh perspective on how knowledge is organized and how ideas can travel across disciplines to illuminate the world around us and our place within it.

About the Author

Currently at the University of Utah, Frederick Adler grew up in Pittsburgh, torn between a love of math, birds, literature and music. He found that mathematics is a form of storytelling that makes sense of nature, his focus for the last 40 years, along with enjoying his family and his childhood loves. He authored the textbook Modeling the Dynamics of Life: Calculus and Probability for Life Scientists and coauthored Urban Ecosystems: Ecological Principles for the Built Environment.