The Invention of the Love Song, the First Algorithm, and the Mathematics of Transcendence: Pythagoras, Sappho, and How Music Made the World Modern

How a refugee and a lesbian lifted humanity from the age of superstition to the age of reason and pioneered the subversive art of telling our own stories by our own truth.

“To create today is to create dangerously,” Albert Camus told a gathering of young people at the peak of the Cold War, shortly after becoming the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize. “The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of s...