Paolo Giordano – författare

'A devastating marvel of a novel' Sunday Telegraph 'A highly enjoyable novel... Giordano is especially good on the textures, smells, heat and colours of the Italian south. These stay long in the mind, as does the way he writes about the obsessiveness of love, the way it dominates and distorts and the self-delusions and fantasies it gives rise to' TLS 'If you're pining for an Italian break, then this might be the remedy: Heaven And Earth is rooted so deep in idyllic Puglia that you can almost feel the red soil under your sandals' Daily Mail 'Raw and evocative: a breathtaking and poignant creation that will leave you itching under the skin' Herald 'A stunning achievement' André Aciman, author of Call Me By Your Name 'Perfect, moving, honest, brilliant, with characters who feel like old friends' Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less 'The perfect novel. Paolo Giordano is one of the handful of great writers working anywhere today' Edmund White Every summer Teresa follows her father to his childhood home in Puglia, down in the heel of Italy, a land of relentless, shimmering heat, centuries-old olive groves and taciturn, proud people. There Teresa spends long afternoons enveloped in a sun-struck stupor, reading her grandmother's cheap crime paperbacks.Everything changes the summer she meets the three boys who live on the masseria next door: Nicola, Tommaso and Bern - the man Teresa will love for the rest of her life. Raised like brothers on a farm that feels to Teresa almost suspended in time, the three boys share a complex, intimate and seemingly unassailable bond. But no bond is unbreakable and no summer truly endless, as Teresa soon discovers. Because there is resentment underneath the surface of that strange brotherhood, a twisted kind of love that protects a dark secret. And when Bern - the enigmatic, restless gravitational centre of the group - commits a brutal act of revenge, not even a final pilgrimage to the edge of the world will be enough to bring back those perfect, golden hours in the shadow of the olive trees.PRAISE FOR PAOLO GIORDANO 'Mesmerizing... Giordano works with piercing subtlety' New York Times'Elegant and fiercely intelligent' Elle'Elegiac, tender and mournful' Wall Street Journal

THE AWARD-WINNING, MILLION-COPY BESTSELLERDiscover the heartbreakingly beautiful novel about the intertwined destinies of two friends brought together by childhood tragedy.'Surprising, intimate and deeply moving’ John Boyne, bestselling author of The Heart’s Invisible Furies‘Mesmerising’ Good HousekeepingA prime number is inherently a solitary thing: it can only be divided by itself, or by one; it never truly fits with another.Alice and Mattia also move on their own axes, alone with their personal tragedies. As a child Alice's overbearing father drove her first to a terrible skiing accident, and then to anorexia. When she meets Mattia she recognises a kindred spirit, and Mattia reveals to Alice his terrible secret: that as a boy he abandoned his mentally-disabled twin sister in a park to go to a party, and when he returned, she was nowhere to be found.These two irreversible episodes mark Alice and Mattia's lives for ever, and as they grow into adulthood their destinies seem irrevocably intertwined.But then a chance sighting of a woman who could be Mattia's sister forces a lifetime of secret emotion to the surface.A meditation on loneliness and love, The Solitude of Prime Numbers asks, can we ever truly be whole when we're in love with another?Praise for The Solitude of Prime Numbers:‘Clear, heartbreakingly precise prose, the youngest ever winner of the prestigious Premio Strega (the Italian Man Booker)... a stunning achievement’ Daily Mail‘Very accomplished... melancholic, but strangely beautiful’ Guardian‘This astute, aching contemplation of solitude has a power to make us all feel a little less alone. A love story told with astonishing perceptiveness and remarkable subtlety’ Stefan Merrill Block, author of The Story of Forgetting‘Incredibly poetic and powerful exploring complex relationships, friendship and trauma’ 5-star reader review‘Will break your heart’ 5-star reader review‘[My] new favourite’ 5-star reader review

'Lucid, calm, informed, directly helpful in trying to think about where we are now... The literature of the time after begins here' Evening Standard'Taking a breather from bewildering statistics and terrible tales of contagion to read Giordano's book was a jolt of brevity and simplicity... It takes concepts that have been dancing away in our minds, just out of reach, and lines them up neatly' The Times'Potent and original' Sunday Times'In one short hour, in the midst of this difficult moment, Giordano reinforced my sense of hope in humanity, in the one and the many' Philippe Sands, author of East West Street and The Rat LineThe Covid-19 pandemic is the most significant health emergency of our time.Writing from Italy in lockdown, physicist and novelist Paolo Giordano explains how disease spreads in our interconnected world: why it mattershow it impacts ushow we must reactExpanding his focus to include other forms of contagion - from the environmental crisis to fake news and xenophobia - Giordano shows us not just how the coronavirus crisis got so bad so quickly, but also how we can work together to create change.Paolo Giordano is a physicist and the author of four bestselling novels. His article 'The Mathematics of Contagion' - published in Italy at the beginning of the coronavirus emergency - was shared more than 4 million times and helped shift public opinion in the early stages of the epidemic.

The present book outlines a conceptual framework for modelling and forecasting the dynamics of both growth-limited cities and megacities bringing together experts from several disciplines. The interdisciplinary point of view is particularly stressed. The contributions presented reflect the various interdependencies between structural (physics and mathematics models) and social development (spatial decision making and urban planning models). The volume emphasizes not only the contributions from different disciplines but also pays attention to specific problems like model calibration, data availability and management, case studies and interactions with urban planners. It is the collection of all the contributions of the speakers at the international workshop "The Dynamics of Complex Urban Systems: an interdisciplinary approach" held at Monte Verita (Ascona/Switzerland) from 4th to 6th of November 2004.

In recent years it has become increasingly clear that the dynamics of cities can be best captured by looking at them as complex systems governed by many degrees of freedom, interacting on different space and time scales in a non-linear fashion. The evolution of cities is shaped by internal factors, e. g. decisions taken by ins- tutions and individuals, external causes (international economic context) and by social development. The underlying processes can be slow or fast, acting locally or globally. At a different level, both European cities and megacities are magnets for immigrants (e. g. countries, which have major economical and political pr- lems), leading often to phenomena like marginalization or even ghettization and segregation. They are also hotbeds of economic, political and cultural activity, giving rise, among other things, to relocation and conversion of industries, - valuation of land, and development of new services. These phenomena as quali- tive changes, are opposed to purely quantitative growth processes. They are far from being fully understood, nor they are captured in validated and complete - ban models. For most of urban theory hitherto has been based on the assumption of slowly varying spatial and social structures. Only recently, these assumptions have been questioned, giving rise to models employing dissipative dynamics, s- chastic cellular automata and multi-agent models, fractal geometry, and evoluti- ary change models, and to further mathematically oriented approaches.

Il testo presenta metodi e modelli per lo studio delle città viste come sistemi evolutivi che interagiscono con il territorio circostante. Gli aspetti morfologici, strutturali e dinamici sono sottolineati e analizzati con metodi qualitativi e quantitativi originati dalla matematica e dalla fisica, ma anche ispirati da altre scienze naturali e dallo studio dei sistemi socio-economici. Il libro usa la matematica in vari modi:  i concetti e i metodi che vanno oltre quelli della matematica elementare vengono introdotti ed esposti brevemente, con particolare attenzione a quelli attinenti a probabilità e statistica che, non facendo parte dell'educazione di base, vengono presentati sistematicamente tramite capitoli appositi. Contributi più specializzati includono argomenti come la dinamica urbana, l'analisi di progetti architettonici per il territorio, l'uso di automi cellulari stocastici, la sintassi dello spazio urbano, l'influenza del paesaggio e della geografia, e i modelliper la mobilità urbana. Il libro è rivolto agli studenti di corsi avanzati di architettura, urbanistica e ingegneria, e a tutte le persone che studiano il territorio o vi operano.