Showing titles in Mathematics

What's the Use? asks why there is such a vast gulf between public perceptions of mathematics and reality. It shows how mathematics is vital, often in surprising ways, behind the scenes of daily life. How politicians pick their voters. How an absurd little puzzle solved 300 years ago leads to efficient methods for kidney transplants. How an Irish mathematician's obsession with a new number system improves special effects in movies and computer games. How SatNav relies on at least six mathematical techniques.

Change Is the Only Constant is an engaging and eloquent exploration of the intersection between calculus and daily life, complete with Orlin's sly humor and wonderfully bad drawings.

Math has certainly gotten a bad reputation for being a subject that involves endless calculations and problems that will never be used in the real world, especially now that we all walk around with calculators in our pockets! But the fact is that math is required in multiple areas of an adult’s life, from preparing recipes to managing finances, and that’s without a career in STEM.

Harvard geometer and Fields medalist Shing-Tung Yau has provided a mathematical foundation for string theory, offered new insights into black holes, and mathematically demonstrated the stability of our universe. In this autobiography, Yau reflects on his improbable journey to becoming one of the world’s most distinguished mathematicians. With complicated ideas explained for a broad audience, listeners not only get insights into the life of an eminent mathematician, but also an accessible way to understand advanced and highly abstract concepts in mathematics and theoretical physics.

The insanely useful strategies presented here are clear and concise and taught with many hand examples that demonstrate profitable poker play. Sky will quiz your understanding throughout the book, and he’ll have you taking action on and off the felt with 55 different actions steps. This isn’t just a hear-it-and-shelve-it poker guide. This audiobook is your new poker coach; teaching you strategies and expecting you to use them. Then when you’re ready, repeating the process with the next valuable set of strategies.

Math has a reputation for being inaccessible. People think that it requires a special gift or that comprehension is a matter of genes. Yet, the greatest mathematicians throughout history, from Rene Descartes to Alexander Grothendieck, have insisted that this is not the case.

It was Richard Feynman's outrageous and scintillating method of teaching that earned him legendary status among students and professors of physics. From 1961 to 1963, Feynman delivered a series of lectures at the California Institute of Technology that revolutionized the teaching of physics around the world. Six Easy Pieces, taken from these famous Lectures on Physics, represent the most accessible material from the series

Probing the life and work of Kurt Gödel, Incompleteness indelibly portrays the tortured genius whose vision rocked the stability of mathematical reasoning—and brought him to the edge of madness.

Our universe has multiple origin stories, from religious creation myths to the Big Bang of scientists. But if we leave those behind and start from nothing – no matter, no cosmos, not even empty space – could we create a universe using only maths? In this new mathematical origin story, mathematician and award-winning novelist Manil Suri creates a natural progression of ideas needed to design our world, starting with numbers and continuing through geometry, algebra, and beyond.

What has counting meant to different cultures and different individuals? In this book, historian and mathematician Benjamin Wardhaugh explores stories from all over the world and from every period of human history, from the African Stone Age to cyberspace; from Assyrian kings to Chinese peasants. Weaving these histories together, Wardhaugh shows the ways in which counting has been continually reinvented over time, through language, writing, counters and machines.

Whether you are an educator, student, researcher, or administrator, it has become even more critical now more than ever to understand what contextualized math curriculum is and how it can be applied inside an online or face-to-face math classroom. What is contextualized mathematics? What are the foundational research underpinnings of contextualized math curriculum? What have we learned about contextualized math curriculum that will improve math education in the future?

Were it not for the calculus, mathematicians would have no way to describe the acceleration of a motorcycle or the effect of gravity on thrown balls and distant planets, or to prove that a man could cross a room and eventually touch the opposite wall. Just how calculus makes these things possible and in doing so finds a correspondence between real numbers and the real world is the subject of this dazzling book by a writer of extraordinary clarity and stylistic brio.

Financial economist George G. Szpiro here tells the fascinating stories of the pioneers of mathematical finance who conducted the search for the elusive options pricing formula. From the broker's assistant who published the first mathematical explanation of financial markets to Albert Einstein and other scientists, Pricing the Future retraces the historical and intellectual developments that ultimately led to the widespread use of mathematical models to drive investment strategies on Wall Street.

Starting with hands, abacus, and slide rule, humans have always reached for tools to simplify math. Pocket-sized calculators ushered in modern mathematics, helped build the atomic bomb, took us to the bottom of the ocean, and accompanied us to the moon. The pocket calculator changed our world, until it was supplanted by more modern devices that, in a cruel twist of irony, it helped to create. Keith Houston transports listeners from the nascent economies of the ancient world to World War II, and into the technological arms race that led to the first affordable electronic pocket calculators.

Whether you are retail employee or a budding entrepreneur, or really just someone looking to contribute to your place of work, you will surely encounter problems that require planning and analysis to address them. What you may not know is that, most of the time statistics, specifically probability and its concepts, will often give you an edge in identifying solutions and strategies to help you move forward with a great plan.

Become a better decision-maker and more informed consumer using statistics stories. Stories stimulate our brains to enhance retention and understanding by evoking emotions. They provide context, helping us grasp complex concepts through real-life examples and establish a connection with the information. By transforming data into narratives, we recall and thus apply insights more effectively, enhancing our ability to make more informed decisions. Perfect for the Math-Averse. You don’t need to crunch numbers to make statistics valuable.

From the contours of coastlines to the outlines of clouds, and the branching of trees, fractal shapes can be found everywhere in nature. In this Very Short Introduction, Kenneth Falconer explains the basic concepts of fractal geometry, which produced a revolution in our mathematical understanding of patterns in the 20th century, and explores the wide range of applications in science, and in aspects of economics.

Two leading data scientists offer an up-close and user-friendly look at artificial intelligence: what it is, how it works, where it came from and how to harness its power for a better world. Dozens of times per day, we all interact with intelligent machines that are constantly learning from the wealth of data now available to them. These machines, from smartphones to talking robots to self-driving cars, are remaking the world in the 21st century in the same way that the Industrial Revolution remade the world in the 19th.

Mathematician Ian Stewart tells listeners what he wishes he had known when he was a student. He takes up subjects ranging from the philosophical to the practical - what mathematics is and why it’s worth doing, the relationship between logic and proof, the role of beauty in mathematical thinking, the future of mathematics, how to deal with the peculiarities of the mathematical community, and many others.

È vero che sono i più capaci ad avere successo nella vita? Questo audiolibro parla della fortuna. O meglio, del ruolo che gioca il caso nella nostra vita in generale, nei nostri affari in particolare. Ma parla anche di quella fortuna che, non essendo percepita come tale, viene scambiata per abilità: una confusione presente in molteplici campi, dalla scienza alla politica, dall'arte alla finanza. Quante volte abbiamo visto un idiota baciato dalla fortuna trovarsi nel posto giusto al momento giusto, dimostrazione vivente della "sopravvivenza del meno adatto"?