Math Without Numbers

Author: Milo Beckman
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241507588
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
'The whizz-kid making maths supercool. . . A brilliant book that takes everything we know (and fear) about maths out of the equation - starting with numbers' The Times 'A cheerful, chatty, and charming trip through the world of mathematics. . . Everyone should read this delightful book' Ian Stewart, author of Do Dice Play God? The only numbers in this book are the page numbers. The three main branches of abstract math - topology, analysis, and algebra - turn out to be surprisingly easy to grasp. Or at least, they are when our guide is a math prodigy. With forthright wit and warm charm, Milo Beckman upends the conventional approach to mathematics, inviting us to think creatively about shape and dimension, the infinite and the infinitesimal, symmetries, proofs, and all how all these concepts fit together. Why is there a million dollar prize for counting shapes? Is anything bigger than infinity? And how is the 'truth' of mathematics actually decided? A vivid and wholly original guide to the math that makes the world tick and the planets revolve, Math Without Numbers makes human and understandable the elevated and hypothetical, allowing us to clearly see abstract math for what it is: bizarre, beautiful, and head-scratchingly wonderful.

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.

Science Without Numbers

Author: Hartry H. Field
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198777914
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
Science Without Numbers caused a stir in 1980, with its bold nominalist approach to the philosophy of mathematics and science. It has been unavailable for twenty years and is now reissued in a revised edition with a substantial new preface presenting the author's current views and responses to the issues raised in subsequent debate.

Mathematics without Numbers

Author: Geoffrey Hellman
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 019152011X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
Geoffrey Hellman presents a detailed interpretation of mathematics as the investigation of structural possibilities, as opposed to absolute, Platonic objects. After dealing with the natural numbers and analysis, he extends his approach to set theory, and shows how to dispense with a fixed universe of sets. Finally, he addresses problems of application to the physical world.

Do Dice Play God?

Author: Ian Stewart
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 178283401X
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
Uncertainty is everywhere. It lurks in every consideration of the future - the weather, the economy, the sex of an unborn child - even quantities we think that we know such as populations or the transit of the planets contain the possibility of error. It's no wonder that, throughout that history, we have attempted to produce rigidly defined areas of uncertainty - we prefer the surprise party to the surprise asteroid. We began our quest to make certain an uncertain world by reading omens in livers, tea leaves, and the stars. However, over the centuries, driven by curiosity, competition, and a desire be better gamblers, pioneering mathematicians and scientists began to reduce wild uncertainties to tame distributions of probability and statistical inferences. But, even as unknown unknowns became known unknowns, our pessimism made us believe that some problems were unsolvable and our intuition misled us. Worse, as we realized how omnipresent and varied uncertainty is, we encountered chaos, quantum mechanics, and the limitations of our predictive power. Bestselling author Professor Ian Stewart explores the history and mathematics of uncertainty. Touching on gambling, probability, statistics, financial and weather forecasts, censuses, medical studies, chaos, quantum physics, and climate, he makes one thing clear: a reasonable probability is the only certainty.

A Mind for Numbers

Author: Barbara A. Oakley
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
ISBN: 039916524X
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
Engineering professor Barbara Oakley knows firsthand how it feels to struggle with math. In her book, she offers you the tools needed to get a better grasp of that intimidating but inescapable field.

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.

Numbers

Author: Heinz-Dieter Ebbinghaus
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9780387974972
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Book Description
This book is about all kinds of numbers, from rationals to octonians, reals to infinitesimals. It is a story about a major thread of mathematics over thousands of years, and it answers everything from why Hamilton was obsessed with quaternions to what the prospect was for quaternionic analysis in the 19th century. It glimpses the mystery surrounding imaginary numbers in the 17th century and views some major developments of the 20th century.

A Day with No Math

Author: Marilyn Kaye
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
ISBN: 9780153010378
Category : Arithmetic
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
What would happen if suddenly there were no numbers? A young boy finds out when he makes a hasty wish and wakes up to a day of frustrating but funny surprises.

Numberless Math Problems

Author: Farrar Williams
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781724460455
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 58

Book Description
Is it possible to do math without using numbers? Absolutely! It encourages students to look beyond the numbers. To answer a problem without the numbers, students can't just pick a random operation. They have to really think about how to solve it.This book is a rewritten version of S.Y. Gillian's classic book Problems Without Figures. Inside you'll find some of her classic problems about farms and bricks with updated language for today's kids. There are also many brand new problems bringing in more about statistics, percentages, and the abundant options of modern life. True to the original text, there are plenty of tricky problems too! To solve a problem, you need the right information. The numberless approach encourages students to talk about their math.