Enlightening Symbols Joseph Mazur Princeton Univ., $29.95 As the semanticist S.I. Hayakawa stressed in his classic book Language in Thought and Action, words are not the things they represent ...

It was while looking for "pretty mathematics" in his spartan rooms at St. John's College in late November 1927 that Dirac literally plucked from thin air what would become known as the Dirac equation.