Download or read book The Story of Our Numbers written by Zelda King and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains the history of written numbers, from ancient Roman numerals to the invention of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system and the spread of the Arabic numeral system around the world.
Download or read book Finding Zero written by Amir D. Aczel and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The invention of numerals is perhaps the greatest abstraction the human mind has ever created. Virtually everything in our lives is digital, numerical, or quantified. The story of how and where we got these numerals, which we so depend on, has for thousands of years been shrouded in mystery. Finding Zero is an adventure filled saga of Amir Aczel's lifelong obsession: to find the original sources of our numerals. Aczel has doggedly crisscrossed the ancient world, scouring dusty, moldy texts, cross examining so-called scholars who offered wildly differing sets of facts, and ultimately penetrating deep into a Cambodian jungle to find a definitive proof. Here, he takes the reader along for the ride. The history begins with the early Babylonian cuneiform numbers, followed by the later Greek and Roman letter numerals. Then Aczel asks the key question: where do the numbers we use today, the so-called Hindu-Arabic numerals, come from? It is this search that leads him to explore uncharted territory, to go on a grand quest into India, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and ultimately into the wilds of Cambodia. There he is blown away to find the earliest zero—the keystone of our entire system of numbers—on a crumbling, vine-covered wall of a seventh-century temple adorned with eaten-away erotic sculptures. While on this odyssey, Aczel meets a host of fascinating characters: academics in search of truth, jungle trekkers looking for adventure, surprisingly honest politicians, shameless smugglers, and treacherous archaeological thieves—who finally reveal where our numbers come from.
Download or read book The Story of Numbers written by John McLeish and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 1994-06-14 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the history of mathematics, discussing the number systems of various cultures which are representative of central themes and issues, and looking at some of the individuals who are responsible for the advancement of mathematics.
Download or read book The Story Of Numbers written by Asok Kumar Mallik and published by #N/A. This book was released on 2017-07-27 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '… this could make an ideal end-of-year prize for a high-school student who is fascinated by all aspects of number. The subsections provide ideas and opportunities for mathematical exploration. This book might also be deemed a suitable resource for first-year undergraduates in that, via independent study, it would allow such students to broaden their knowledge of various number-theoretic ideas. I would recommend it for the purposes given above.'The Mathematical GazetteThis book is more than a mathematics textbook. It discusses various kinds of numbers and curious interconnections between them. Without getting into hardcore and difficult mathematical technicalities, the book lucidly introduces all kinds of numbers that mathematicians have created. Interesting anecdotes involving great mathematicians and their marvelous creations are included. The reader will get a glimpse of the thought process behind the invention of new mathematics. Starting from natural numbers, the book discusses integers, real numbers, imaginary and complex numbers and some special numbers like quaternions, dual numbers and p-adic numbers.Real numbers include rational, irrational and transcendental numbers. Iterations on real numbers are shown to throw up some unexpected behavior, which has given rise to the new science of 'Chaos'. Special numbers like e, pi, golden ratio, Euler's constant, Gauss's constant, amongst others, are discussed in great detail.The origin of imaginary numbers and the use of complex numbers constitute the next topic. It is shown why modern mathematics cannot even be imagined without imaginary numbers. Iterations on complex numbers are shown to generate a new mathematical object called 'Fractal', which is ubiquitous in nature. Finally, some very special numbers, not mentioned in the usual textbooks, and their applications, are introduced at an elementary level.The level of mathematics discussed in this book is easily accessible to young adults interested in mathematics, high school students, and adults having some interest in basic mathematics. The book concentrates more on the story than on rigorous mathematics.
Download or read book The History of Zero written by Tika Downey and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at counting systems and the history of the number zero.
Download or read book Making Numbers Count written by Chip Heath and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clear, practical, first-of-its-kind guide to communicating and understanding numbers and data—from bestselling business author Chip Heath. How much bigger is a billion than a million? Well, a million seconds is twelve days. A billion seconds is…thirty-two years. Understanding numbers is essential—but humans aren’t built to understand them. Until very recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five—anything from six to infinity was known as “lots.” While the numbers in our world have gotten increasingly complex, our brains are stuck in the past. How can we translate millions and billions and milliseconds and nanometers into things we can comprehend and use? Author Chip Heath has excelled at teaching others about making ideas stick and here, in Making Numbers Count, he outlines specific principles that reveal how to translate a number into our brain’s language. This book is filled with examples of extreme number makeovers, vivid before-and-after examples that take a dry number and present it in a way that people click in and say “Wow, now I get it!” You will learn principles such as: -SIMPLE PERSPECTIVE CUES: researchers at Microsoft found that adding one simple comparison sentence doubled how accurately users estimated statistics like population and area of countries. -VIVIDNESS: get perspective on the size of a nucleus by imagining a bee in a cathedral, or a pea in a racetrack, which are easier to envision than “1/100,000th of the size of an atom.” -CONVERT TO A PROCESS: capitalize on our intuitive sense of time (5 gigabytes of music storage turns into “2 months of commutes, without repeating a song”). -EMOTIONAL MEASURING STICKS: frame the number in a way that people already care about (“that medical protocol would save twice as many women as curing breast cancer”). Whether you’re interested in global problems like climate change, running a tech firm or a farm, or just explaining how many Cokes you’d have to drink if you burned calories like a hummingbird, this book will help math-lovers and math-haters alike translate the numbers that animate our world—allowing us to bring more data, more naturally, into decisions in our schools, our workplaces, and our society.
Download or read book e The Story of a Number written by Eli Maor and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-12 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The interest earned on a bank account, the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower, and the shape of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis are all intimately connected with the mysterious number e. In this informal and engaging history, Eli Maor portrays the curious characters and the elegant mathematics that lie behind the number. Designed for a reader with only a modest mathematical background, this biography brings out the central importance of e to mathematics and illuminates a golden era in the age of science.
Download or read book Numbers written by Graham Flegg and published by Schocken. This book was released on 1983 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extremely readable, jargon-free book for general readers traces the evolution of counting systems, from the primitive techniques of antiquity to computers. Text examines the earliest endeavors to count and record numbers, initial attempts to solve problems by using equations, and origins of infinite cardinal arithmetic. "Surprisingly exciting." -- "Choice."
Download or read book The Story of Numbers and Counting written by Anita Ganeri and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1996 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents an overview of the use of numbers, from ancient times to the present, including the development of number systems, counting methods, mathematics, and counting machines.
Download or read book Number Story written by Peter Michael Higgins and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peter Higgins distills centuries of work into one delightful narrative that celebrates the mystery of numbers and explains how different kinds of numbers arose and why they are useful. Full of historical snippets and interesting examples, the book ranges from simple number puzzles and magic tricks, to showing how ideas about numbers relate to real-world problems. This fascinating book will inspire and entertain readers across a range of abilities. Easy material is blended with more challenging ideas. As our understanding of numbers continues to evolve, this book invites us to rediscover the mystery and beauty of numbers.
Download or read book Fibonacci s Liber Abaci written by Laurence Sigler and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1202, Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci was one of the most important books on mathematics in the Middle Ages, introducing Arabic numerals and methods throughout Europe. This is the first translation into a modern European language, of interest not only to historians of science but also to all mathematicians and mathematics teachers interested in the origins of their methods.
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.
Download or read book Origin of the Arabic Numerals written by Adel S. Bishtawi and published by Authorhouse UK. This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The wonder of the unique Arabic numerals is so blunted by common use we forget sometimes that their sudden disappearance might cause our civilisation to grind to a halt with catastrophic consequences. The invention of the system was as a great a revolution as the invention of writing, and to both the transition from barbarism to civilisation is attributed. Indeed, both may have a single source created in a time beyond the horizon of our remotest past. Contrary to what is generally believed, there lies the origin of the Arabic numerals - beyond the horizon of our remotest past. The history of our ancient numerals has been an intriguing mystery. For over two centuries historians of numbers have tried to trace the roots of the system. Hundreds of manuscripts have been analysed and then reanalysed, historical accounts studied, and book after book churned out but remarkably, solid leads to the origin of the numerals remained cold. Almost despairingly, Karl Menninger confessed that the "desire to hold in one's hand the key to a mystery which experts have sought for in vain remains alive in all periods of history". In this thoroughly researched book, historian Adel S. Bishtawi believes the mystery has been unlocked, and in the process, much more was found than expected. If his conclusions are correct, our numerals, which are miniature drawings of the hand and fingers, may be 5000-7000 years old. Moreover, it is known that numerals were invented before the letters of alphabets. It is probable that some of these numerals were employed as letters in the universal alphabet used by most nations.
Download or read book The Story of Money written by Betsy Maestro and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1993-03-22 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of money, beginning with the barter system in prehistoric times, to the first use of coins and paper money, to the development of the modern monetary system.
Download or read book The Number of the Heavens written by Tom Siegfried and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most controversial, cutting-edge ideas in cosmology—the possibility that there exist multiple parallel universes—in fact has a long history. Tom Siegfried reminds us that the size and number of the heavens have been contested since ancient times. His story offers deep lessons about the nature of science and the quest for understanding.
Download or read book Number Talks written by Sherry Parrish and published by Math Solutions. This book was released on 2010 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A multimedia professional learning resource"--Cover.
Download or read book The Story of Algebraic Numbers in the First Half of the 20th Century written by Władysław Narkiewicz and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-18 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is aimed at people working in number theory or at least interested in this part of mathematics. It presents the development of the theory of algebraic numbers up to the year 1950 and contains a rather complete bibliography of that period. The reader will get information about results obtained before 1950. It is hoped that this may be helpful in preventing rediscoveries of old results, and might also inspire the reader to look at the work done earlier, which may hide some ideas which could be applied in contemporary research.
