Sam, Jane, Felix, Elzabet (Lady Elzabet of Quynt), Tinka, and Marco have just been brought together - a mismatched bunch over-qualified and highly-skilled trainees from all corners of the Concordat, assembled on a small moon, taking their first steps toward Starhome and qualification as galactic citizens. If they survive. Their first training mission: An extended voyage to the boondocks, out in space where all they can damage is themselves (and a very expensive Da Silva starship). Everything starts out normally, quantum jumping through space-time congruences as the Da Silva drive does... until it's very much not normal, and they find themselves in a very strange place indeed. True to form of the best science fiction, Living Labyrinth wrings out every angle of a plausible scientific idea all inside a great story. Together and apart, Ian Stewart and Tim Poston have written many best-selling science and science fiction books, and highly referenced math/scientific journal articles.
Author Biography:
Ian Stewart was born in 1945, educated at Cambridge (MA) and Warwick (PhD). He has five honorary doctorates and is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University. He has published over 80 books including Does God Play Dice?, Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, Why Beauty is Truth, Flatterland, What Shape is a Snowflake?, Nature's Numbers, Professor Stewart's Incredible Numbers, Seventeen Equations that Changed the World, and the bestselling series The Science of Discworld series with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen. His awards include the Royal Society's Faraday Medal, the Gold Medal of the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, the Public Understanding of Science Award of the AAAS, and the LMS/IMA Zeeman Medal. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001 and currently serves on its governing body. He has also written two science fiction novels Wheelers and Heaven with Jack Cohen. He makes frequent radio and television appearances, including the 1997 Christmas Lectures. He is an active research mathematician with over 190 published papers, and works on pattern formation, chaos, network dynamics, and biomathematics. He lives in Coventry, England. Tim Poston is an interdisciplinary scientist, with a 1972 Mathematics PhD from the University of Warwick, England. He has since worked in universities from Brazil to South Korea, and in companies ranging from start-ups to GE, in sciences and technologies from ophthalmology to archaeology. Much of this work has led to books and other publications (87, with 2,148 citations on ResearchGate), some to patents (currently 26 issued, several pending), from search presentation technology to glyph rendering, calibrating magnetic resonance receiver coils, the 5-dimensional geometry of real binary quartics, vibration spectra of crystals, brain surgery planning, settlement patterns in archaeology, rod buckling, vision (human and machine), and 3D medical image analysis. For the last two decades his chief concerns have been in the acquisition and analysis of medical images, and practical human-machine interaction. He enjoys change and simultaneity quakes. The two have worked together since the mid-1970s on a variety of projects, including their joint text Catastrophe Theory and Its Applications (over 1000 citations on ResearchGate).
