The Boy Who Loved Math

Author: Deborah Heiligman
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
ISBN: 146683952X
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 48

Book Description
Most people think of mathematicians as solitary, working away in isolation. And, it's true, many of them do. But Paul Erdos never followed the usual path. At the age of four, he could ask you when you were born and then calculate the number of seconds you had been alive in his head. But he didn't learn to butter his own bread until he turned twenty. Instead, he traveled around the world, from one mathematician to the next, collaborating on an astonishing number of publications. With a simple, lyrical text and richly layered illustrations, this is a beautiful introduction to the world of math and a fascinating look at the unique character traits that made "Uncle Paul" a great man. The Boy Who Loved Math by Deborah Heiligman is a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013 and a New York Times Book Review Notable Children's Book of 2013.

My Brain is Open

Author: Bruce Schechter
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0684859807
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Traces the eccentric life of legendary mathematician Paul Erdos, a wandering genius who fled his native Hungary during the Holocaust and helped devise the mathematical basis of computer science.

The Discrete Mathematical Charms of Paul Erdos

Author: Vašek Chvátal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108934919
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
Paul Erdős published more papers during his lifetime than any other mathematician, especially in discrete mathematics. He had a nose for beautiful, simply-stated problems with solutions that have far-reaching consequences across mathematics. This captivating book, written for students, provides an easy-to-understand introduction to discrete mathematics by presenting questions that intrigued Erdős, along with his brilliant ways of working toward their answers. It includes young Erdős's proof of Bertrand's postulate, the Erdős-Szekeres Happy End Theorem, De Bruijn-Erdős theorem, Erdős-Rado delta-systems, Erdős-Ko-Rado theorem, Erdős-Stone theorem, the Erdős-Rényi-Sós Friendship Theorem, Erdős-Rényi random graphs, the Chvátal-Erdős theorem on Hamilton cycles, and other results of Erdős, as well as results related to his work, such as Ramsey's theorem or Deza's theorem on weak delta-systems. Its appendix covers topics normally missing from introductory courses. Filled with personal anecdotes about Erdős, this book offers a behind-the-scenes look at interactions with the legendary collaborator.

The Man Who Knew Infinity

Author: Robert Kanigel
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476763496
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Book Description
A biography of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. The book gives a detailed account of his upbringing in India, his mathematical achievements, and his mathematical collaboration with English mathematician G. H. Hardy. The book also reviews the life of Hardy and the academic culture of Cambridge University during the early twentieth century.

The Man of Numbers

Author: Keith Devlin
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408824574
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
In 1202, a 32-year old Italian finished one of the most influential books of all time, which introduced modern arithmetic to Western Europe. Devised in India in the seventh and eighth centuries and brought to North Africa by Muslim traders, the Hindu-Arabic system helped transform the West into the dominant force in science, technology, and commerce, leaving behind Muslim cultures which had long known it but had failed to see its potential. The young Italian, Leonardo of Pisa (better known today as Fibonacci), had learned the Hindu number system when he traveled to North Africa with his father, a customs agent. The book he created was Liber abbaci, the 'Book of Calculation', and the revolution that followed its publication was enormous. Arithmetic made it possible for ordinary people to buy and sell goods, convert currencies, and keep accurate records of possessions more readily than ever before. Liber abbaci's publication led directly to large-scale international commerce and the scientific revolution of the Renaissance. Yet despite the ubiquity of his discoveries, Leonardo of Pisa remains an enigma. His name is best known today in association with an exercise in Liber abbaci whose solution gives rise to a sequence of numbers - the Fibonacci sequence - used by some to predict the rise and fall of financial markets, and evident in myriad biological structures. In The Man of Numbers, Keith Devlin recreates the life and enduring legacy of an overlooked genius, and in the process makes clear how central numbers and mathematics are to our daily lives.

How Not to Be Wrong

Author: Jordan Ellenberg
Publisher: Penguin Press
ISBN: 1594205221
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 480

Book Description
A brilliant tour of mathematical thought and a guide to becoming a better thinker, How Not to Be Wrong shows that math is not just a long list of rules to be learned and carried out by rote. Math touches everything we do; It's what makes the world make sense. Using the mathematician's methods and hard-won insights-minus the jargon-professor and popular columnist Jordan Ellenberg guides general readers through his ideas with rigor and lively irreverence, infusing everything from election results to baseball to the existence of God and the psychology of slime molds with a heightened sense of clarity and wonder. Armed with the tools of mathematics, we can see the hidden structures beneath the messy and chaotic surface of our daily lives. How Not to Be Wrong shows us how--Publisher's description.

Number Theory and Its History

Author: Oystein Ore
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486136434
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
Unusually clear, accessible introduction covers counting, properties of numbers, prime numbers, Aliquot parts, Diophantine problems, congruences, much more. Bibliography.

A Mathematician's Apology

Author: G. H. Hardy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521427067
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 158

Book Description
G. H. Hardy was one of this century's finest mathematical thinkers, renowned among his contemporaries as a 'real mathematician ... the purest of the pure'. He was also, as C. P. Snow recounts in his Foreword, 'unorthodox, eccentric, radical, ready to talk about anything'. This 'apology', written in 1940 as his mathematical powers were declining, offers a brilliant and engaging account of mathematics as very much more than a science; when it was first published, Graham Greene hailed it alongside Henry James's notebooks as 'the best account of what it was like to be a creative artist'. C. P. Snow's Foreword gives sympathetic and witty insights into Hardy's life, with its rich store of anecdotes concerning his collaboration with the brilliant Indian mathematician Ramanujan, his aphorisms and idiosyncrasies, and his passion for cricket. This is a unique account of the fascination of mathematics and of one of its most compelling exponents in modern times.

Numbers Rule

Author: George Szpiro
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691209081
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
The author takes the general reader on a tour of the mathematical puzzles and paradoxes inherent in voting systems, such as the Alabama Paradox, in which an increase in the number of seats in the Congress could actually lead to a reduced number of representatives for a state, and the Condorcet Paradox, which demonstrates that the winner of elections featuring more than two candidates does not necessarily reflect majority preferences. Szpiro takes a roughly chronological approach to the topic, traveling from ancient Greece to the present and, in addition to offering explanations of the various mathematical conundrums of elections and voting, also offers biographical details on the mathematicians and other thinkers who thought about them, including Plato, Pliny the Younger, Pierre Simon Laplace, Thomas Jefferson, John von Neumann, and Kenneth Arrow.

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

Author: Paul Hoffman
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 0306836564
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
"A funny, marvelously readable portrait of one of the most brilliant and eccentric men in history." --The Seattle Times Paul Erdos was an amazing and prolific mathematician whose life as a world-wandering numerical nomad was legendary. He published almost 1500 scholarly papers before his death in 1996, and he probably thought more about math problems than anyone in history. Like a traveling salesman offering his thoughts as wares, Erdos would show up on the doorstep of one mathematician or another and announce, "My brain is open." After working through a problem, he'd move on to the next place, the next solution. Hoffman's book, like Sylvia Nasar's biography of John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, reveals a genius's life that transcended the merely quirky. But Erdos's brand of madness was joyful, unlike Nash's despairing schizophrenia. Erdos never tried to dilute his obsessive passion for numbers with ordinary emotional interactions, thus avoiding hurting the people around him, as Nash did. Oliver Sacks writes of Erdos: "A mathematical genius of the first order, Paul Erdos was totally obsessed with his subject--he thought and wrote mathematics for nineteen hours a day until the day he died. He traveled constantly, living out of a plastic bag, and had no interest in food, sex, companionship, art--all that is usually indispensable to a human life." The Man Who Loved Only Numbers is easy to love, despite his strangeness. It's hard not to have affection for someone who referred to children as "epsilons," from the Greek letter used to represent small quantities in mathematics; a man whose epitaph for himself read, "Finally I am becoming stupider no more"; and whose only really necessary tool to do his work was a quiet and open mind. Hoffman, who followed and spoke with Erdos over the last 10 years of his life, introduces us to an undeniably odd, yet pure and joyful, man who loved numbers more than he loved God--whom he referred to as SF, for Supreme Fascist. He was often misunderstood, and he certainly annoyed people sometimes, but Paul Erdos is no doubt missed. --Therese Littleton