Download or read book Seduced By Mathematics The Enduring Fascination Of Mathematics written by James D Stein and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2022-07-20 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seduction is not just an end result, but a process — and in mathematics, both the end results and the process by which those end results are achieved are often charming and elegant.This helps to explain why so many people — not just those for whom math plays a key role in their day-to-day lives — have found mathematics so seductive. Math is unique among all subjects in that it contains end results of amazing insight and power, and lines of reasoning that are clever, charming, and elegant. This book is a collection of those results and lines of reasoning that make us say, 'OMG, that's just amazing,' — because that's what mathematics is to those who love it. In addition, some of the stories about mathematical discoveries and the people who discovered them are every bit as fascinating as the discoveries themselves.This book contains material capable of being appreciated by students in elementary school — as well as some material that will probably be new to even the more mathematically sophisticated. Most of the book can be easily understood by those whose only math courses are algebra and geometry, and who may have missed the magic, enchantment, and wonder that is the special province of mathematics.
Download or read book Sharpening Everyday Mental thinking Skills Through Mathematics Problem Solving And Beyond written by Alfred S Posamentier and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2024-01-22 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mathematics is a subject taught from kindergarten through to high school, and yet it is the one subject that most adults are almost proud to admit to not having been very good at, and, therefore, tend to avoid it where they can. However, one of the key factors in mathematics is its ability to enable us to solve everyday problems. When we consider 'the worst-case scenario' of the situation, it is analogous to solving a mathematical problem by considering extremes. Or, we might consider the best path to take from point A to point B, where geometric relationships can be helpful. This book is intended to demonstrate a variety of neglected aspects of mathematics, in order to demonstrate the power and beauty of the field of mathematics beyond where most people, students, and teachers believe is possible.The chapters of the book explore a multitude of topics: unusual arithmetic calculations and shortcuts, entertaining and instructional problem-solving strategies, unusual applications of algebra, and how geometry allows us to better appreciate physical relationships. Only a basic mathematical knowledge is needed to understand these topics and problems; however, the book also demonstrates that, armed with even this level of understanding, our mathematical skills far exceed what we learned at school! The final chapter is the most challenging, and explores a curious problem-solving technique.
Download or read book Introduction To Chaos Fractals And Dynamical Systems written by Phillip A Laplante and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2023-07-26 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a fun and enriching introduction to chaos theory, fractals and dynamical systems, and on the applications of fractals to computer generated graphics and image compression. Introduction to Chaos, Fractals and Dynamical Systems particularly focuses on natural and human phenomenon that can be modeled as fractals, using simple examples to explain the theory of chaos and how it affects all of us. Then, using straightforward mathematic and intuitive descriptions, computer generated graphics and photographs of natural scenes are used to illustrate the beauty of fractals and their importance in our world. Finally, the concept of Dynamical Systems, that is, time-dependent systems, the foundation of Chaos and Fractal, is introduced. Everyday examples are again used to illustrate concepts, and the importance of understanding how these vital systems affect our lives. Throughout the fascinating history of the evolution of chaos theory, fractals and dynamical systems is presented, along with brief introductions to the scientists, mathematicians and engineers who created this knowledge.Introduction to Chaos, Fractals and Dynamical Systems contains ample mathematical definitions, representations, discussions and exercises, so that this book can be used as primary or secondary source in home schooling environments.The book is suitable for homeschooling as a focused course on the subject matter or as a classroom supplement for a variety of courses at the late junior high or early high-school level. For example, in addition to a standalone course on Chaos, Fractals and Dynamical Systems (or similar title), this book could be used with the following courses:The text can also be used in conjunction with mathematics courses for undergraduates for non-science majors. The book can also be used for informal and lively family study and discussion.For each chapter, exercises and things to do are included. These activities range from simple computational tasks to more elaborate computer projects, related activities, biographical research and writing assignments.
Download or read book Seduced by Logic written by Robyn Arianrhod and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Einstein's Heroes, comes the gripping story of two of the most glamorous and influential women of mathematics Issac Newton's Principia changed forever humanity's understanding of its place in the universe - not with the traditional tools of theology or philosophy but with the seductive logic of mathematics. But it was feisty French aristocratic Émilie du Châtelet who played a key role in bring Newton's revolutionary opus to a Continental audience. Together with her lover Voltaire, Émilie - a largely self taught scholar - personified the exciting mix of science, literature, politics and philosophy that defined the Enlightenment. A century later, In Scotland, Mary Somerville taught herself mathematics and rose from genteel poverty to become a world authority on Newtonian physics. Mary's many books, and her charm, made her a legend in her own lifetime. Connected by their passion for mathematics, Mary and Émilie bring to life a defining period in science and politics, revealing the intimate links between the unfolding Newtonian revolution and the origins of intellectual and political liberty. Seduced by Logic is a thrilling foray into the lives of these extraordinary women - and the fascinating ideas that seduced them both. PRAISE FOR ROBYN ARIANRHOD'S EINSTEIN'S HEROES 'Robyn Arianrhod's passion for mathematics is so infectious, you'll scream 'Eureka' when you read her book.' HERALD-SUN 'I read this exhilarating book as I would a novel. Arianrhod combines a passion for her subject with an erudition that is rate for a storyteller' Robyn Williams, ABC'S THE SCIENCE SHOW
Download or read book Seduction and Power written by Silke Knippschild and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a conference held at the University of Bristol in September, 2010.
Download or read book The Art of seduction written by Robert Green and published by Imharjeetsingh . This book was released on with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the multi-million copy bestseller The 48 Laws of Power and The Laws of Human Nature, a mesmerizing handbook on seduction: the most subtle and effective form of power When raised to the level of art, seduction, an indirect and subtle form of power, has toppled empires, won elections and enslaved great minds. Immerse yourself in the twenty-four maneuvers and strategies of the seductive process, the ritual by which a seducer gains mastery over his target. Understand how to "Poeticize Your Presence," “Keep them in Suspense – What Comes Next” and “Master the Art of the Bold Move”. Every bit as essential as The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction is an indispensable primer of persuasion that reveals one of history's greatest weapons and the ultimate form of power.
Download or read book The Sense of an Ending written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
Download or read book Mathematics Across Cultures written by Helaine Selin and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mathematics Across Cultures: A History of Non-Western Mathematics consists of essays dealing with the mathematical knowledge and beliefs of cultures outside the United States and Europe. In addition to articles surveying Islamic, Chinese, Native American, Aboriginal Australian, Inca, Egyptian, and African mathematics, among others, the book includes essays on Rationality, Logic and Mathematics, and the transfer of knowledge from East to West. The essays address the connections between science and culture and relate the mathematical practices to the cultures which produced them. Each essay is well illustrated and contains an extensive bibliography. Because the geographic range is global, the book fills a gap in both the history of science and in cultural studies. It should find a place on the bookshelves of advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars, as well as in libraries serving those groups.
Download or read book Lost in Thought written by Zena Hitz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An invitation to readers from every walk of life to rediscover the impractical splendors of a life of learning In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Hitz's own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought. Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us. Reminding us of who we once were and who we might become, Lost in Thought is a moving account of why renewing our inner lives is fundamental to preserving our humanity.
Download or read book Fire and Light written by James MacGregor Burns and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-10-29 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With this profound and magnificent book, drawing on his deep reservoir of thought and expertise in the humanities, James MacGregor Burns takes us into the fire's center. As a 21st-century philosopher, he brings to vivid life the incandescent personalities and ideas that embody the best in Western civilization and shows us how understanding them is essential for anyone who would seek to decipher the complex problems and potentialities of the world we will live in tomorrow." --Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author of Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989 "James MacGregor Burns is a national treasure, and Fire and Light is the elegiac capstone to a career devoted to understanding the seminal ideas that made America - for better and for worse - what it is." --Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Revolutionary Summer Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning governments, and inspiring visionary political experiments. Fire and Light brings to vivid life the galaxy of revolutionary leaders of thought and action who, armed with a new sense of human possibility, driven by a hunger for change, created the modern world. Burns discovers the origins of a distinctive American Enlightenment in men like the Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and their early encounters with incendiary European ideas about liberty and equality. It was these thinker-activists who framed the United States as a grand and continuing experiment in Enlightenment principles. Today the same questions Enlightenment thinkers grappled with have taken on new urgency around the world: in the turmoil of the Arab Spring, in the former Soviet Union, and China, as well as in the United States itself. What should a nation be? What should citizens expect from their government? Who should lead and how can leadership be made both effective and accountable? What is happiness, and what can the state contribute to it? Burns's exploration of the ideals and arguments that formed the bedrock of our modern world shines a new light on these ever-important questions.
Download or read book Mathematical Encounters of the Second Kind written by Philip J. Davis and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1997 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir of mathematician Philip Davis's life and encounters, some actual and some imaginary, with a number of mathematicians and historical figures. His message focuses on the idea that mathematics can bring people into contacts with each other across centuries, oceans, and cultural difference. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book The Topkapi Scroll written by Gülru Necipoğlu and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 1996-03-01 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since precious few architectural drawings and no theoretical treatises on architecture remain from the premodern Islamic world, the Timurid pattern scroll in the collection of the Topkapi Palace Museum Library is an exceedingly rich and valuable source of information. In the course of her in-depth analysis of this scroll dating from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, Gülru Necipoğlu throws new light on the conceptualization, recording, and transmission of architectural design in the Islamic world between the tenth and sixteenth centuries. Her text has particularly far-reaching implications for recent discussions on vision, subjectivity, and the semiotics of abstract representation. She also compares the Islamic understanding of geometry with that found in medieval Western art, making this book particularly valuable for all historians and critics of architecture. The scroll, with its 114 individual geometric patterns for wall surfaces and vaulting, is reproduced entirely in color in this elegant, large-format volume. An extensive catalogue includes illustrations showing the underlying geometries (in the form of incised “dead” drawings) from which the individual patterns are generated. An essay by Mohammad al-Asad discusses the geometry of the muqarnas and demonstrates by means of CAD drawings how one of the scroll’s patterns could be used co design a three-dimensional vault.
Download or read book mile Zola a Very Short Introduction written by Brian Nelson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: �mile Zola was the leader of the literary movement known as 'naturalism' and is one of the great figures of the novel. In his monumental Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-93), he explored the social and cultural landscape of the late nineteenth century in ways that scandalized bourgeois society. Zola opened the novel up to a new realm of subjects, including the realities of working-class life, class relations, and questions of gender and sexuality, and his writing embodied a new freedom of expression, with his bold, outspoken voice often inviting controversy. In this Very Short Introduction, Brian Nelson examines Zola's major themes and narrative art. He illuminates the social and political contexts of Zola's work, and provides readings of five individual novels (The Belly of Paris, L'Assommoir, The Ladies' Paradise, Germinal, and Earth). Zola's naturalist theories, which attempted to align literature with science, helped to generate the stereotypical notion that his fiction was somehow nonfictional. Nelson, however, reveals how the most distinctive elements of Zola's writing go far beyond his theoretical naturalism, giving his novels their unique force. Throughout, he sets Zola's work in context, considering his relations with contemporary painters, his role in the Dreyfus Affair, and his eventual murder. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book Closing of the American Mind written by Allan Bloom and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The brilliant, controversial, bestselling critique of American culture that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times)—now featuring a new afterword by Andrew Ferguson in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. In 1987, eminent political philosopher Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, an appraisal of contemporary America that “hits with the approximate force and effect of electroshock therapy” (The New York Times) and has not only been vindicated, but has also become more urgent today. In clear, spirited prose, Bloom argues that the social and political crises of contemporary America are part of a larger intellectual crisis: the result of a dangerous narrowing of curiosity and exploration by the university elites. Now, in this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, acclaimed author and journalist Andrew Ferguson contributes a new essay that describes why Bloom’s argument caused such a furor at publication and why our culture so deeply resists its truths today.
Download or read book An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution written by Mary Wollstonecraft and published by . This book was released on 1794 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Plugged in written by Patti M. Valkenburg and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-01 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- 1 Youth and Media -- 2 Then and Now -- 3 Themes and Theoretical Perspectives -- 4 Infants, Toddlers, and Preschoolers -- 5 Children -- 6 Adolescents -- 7 Media and Violence -- 8 Media and Emotions -- 9 Advertising and Commercialism -- 10 Media and Sex -- 11 Media and Education -- 12 Digital Games -- 13 Social Media -- 14 Media and Parenting -- 15 The End -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Y -- Z
