Math Without Numbers

Author : Milo Beckman
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1524745561
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Math Without Numbers written by Milo Beckman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illustrated tour of the structures and patterns we call "math" The only numbers in this book are the page numbers. Math Without Numbers is a vivid, conversational, and wholly original guide to the three main branches of abstract math—topology, analysis, and algebra—which turn out to be surprisingly easy to grasp. This book upends the conventional approach to math, inviting you to think creatively about shape and dimension, the infinite and infinitesimal, symmetries, proofs, and how these concepts all fit together. What awaits readers is a freewheeling tour of the inimitable joys and unsolved mysteries of this curiously powerful subject. Like the classic math allegory Flatland, first published over a century ago, or Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach forty years ago, there has never been a math book quite like Math Without Numbers. So many popularizations of math have dwelt on numbers like pi or zero or infinity. This book goes well beyond to questions such as: How many shapes are there? Is anything bigger than infinity? And is math even true? Milo Beckman shows why math is mostly just pattern recognition and how it keeps on surprising us with unexpected, useful connections to the real world. The ambitions of this book take a special kind of author. An inventive, original thinker pursuing his calling with jubilant passion. A prodigy. Milo Beckman completed the graduate-level course sequence in mathematics at age sixteen, when he was a sophomore at Harvard; while writing this book, he was studying the philosophical foundations of physics at Columbia under Brian Greene, among others.

Author : Milo Beckman
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0241507588
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Math Without Numbers written by Milo Beckman and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2021-01-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '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.

Author : Hartry Field
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191083771
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Science without Numbers written by Hartry Field and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-13 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science Without Numbers caused a stir in philosophy on its original publication in 1980, with its bold nominalist approach to the ontology of mathematics and science. Hartry Field argues that we can explain the utility of mathematics without assuming it true. Part of the argument is that good mathematics has a special feature ("conservativeness") that allows it to be applied to "nominalistic" claims (roughly, those neutral to the existence of mathematical entities) in a way that generates nominalistic consequences more easily without generating any new ones. Field goes on to argue that we can axiomatize physical theories using nominalistic claims only, and that in fact this has advantages over the usual axiomatizations that are independent of nominalism. There has been much debate about the book since it first appeared. It is now reissued in a revised contains a substantial new preface giving the author's current views on the original book and the issues that were raised in the subsequent discussion of it.

Author : Jordan Ellenberg
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0143127535
Total Pages : 482 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book How Not to Be Wrong written by Jordan Ellenberg and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-05-26 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Witty, compelling, and just plain fun to read . . ." —Evelyn Lamb, Scientific American The Freakonomics of math—a math-world superstar unveils the hidden beauty and logic of the world and puts its power in our hands The math we learn in school can seem like a dull set of rules, laid down by the ancients and not to be questioned. In How Not to Be Wrong, Jordan Ellenberg shows us how terribly limiting this view is: Math isn’t confined to abstract incidents that never occur in real life, but rather touches everything we do—the whole world is shot through with it. Math allows us to see the hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of our world. It’s a science of not being wrong, hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument. Armed with the tools of mathematics, we can see through to the true meaning of information we take for granted: How early should you get to the airport? What does “public opinion” really represent? Why do tall parents have shorter children? Who really won Florida in 2000? And how likely are you, really, to develop cancer? How Not to Be Wrong presents the surprising revelations behind all of these questions and many more, using the mathematician’s method of analyzing life and exposing the hard-won insights of the academic community to the layman—minus the jargon. Ellenberg chases mathematical threads through a vast range of time and space, from the everyday to the cosmic, encountering, among other things, baseball, Reaganomics, daring lottery schemes, Voltaire, the replicability crisis in psychology, Italian Renaissance painting, artificial languages, the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the coming obesity apocalypse, Antonin Scalia’s views on crime and punishment, the psychology of slime molds, what Facebook can and can’t figure out about you, and the existence of God. Ellenberg pulls from history as well as from the latest theoretical developments to provide those not trained in math with the knowledge they need. Math, as Ellenberg says, is “an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength.” With the tools of mathematics in hand, you can understand the world in a deeper, more meaningful way. How Not to Be Wrong will show you how.

Author : Ian Stewart
Publisher : Profile Books
ISBN 13 : 178283401X
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Do Dice Play God? written by Ian Stewart and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Barbara A. Oakley
Publisher : TarcherPerigee
ISBN 13 : 039916524X
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Mind for Numbers written by Barbara A. Oakley and published by TarcherPerigee. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Geoffrey Hellman
Publisher : Clarendon Press
ISBN 13 : 019152011X
Total Pages : 172 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mathematics without Numbers written by Geoffrey Hellman and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1989-10-12 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Marilyn Kaye
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P
ISBN 13 : 9780153010378
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Day with No Math written by Marilyn Kaye and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P. This book was released on 1992 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Edward MacNeal
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0140234861
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.62/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mathsemantics written by Edward MacNeal and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1995-03-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is a whole new way of looking at math that liberates math phobes from their anxiety, enables business people to do their jobs more effectively, challenges and informs math buffs, and provides educators with the tools to teach math easily and effectively. How can it do all that? By reuniting numbers and meaning, two subjects that should never have been separated in the first place. Entertaining, anecdotal, and immensely practical, this extraordinary book offers a revolutionary way of looking at math as a language, something that we've all heard before but which has never made sense until now. Mathsemantics is that rare book that will change the way you look at the world—and provide the most sensible and inspiring answer yet to the problem of American innumeracy. "Eye opening . . . a good antidote to innumeracy."—Library Journal

Author : Andrew King
Publisher : Copper Beach Books
ISBN 13 : 9780761307228
Total Pages : 36 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Exploring Numbers written by Andrew King and published by Copper Beach Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Games and projects introduce the number system, starting with place value and ending with the four operations--addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.