Download or read book Undiluted Hocus Pocus written by Martin Gardner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The autobiography of the beloved writer who inspired a generation to study math and science Martin Gardner wrote the Mathematical Games column for Scientific American for twenty-five years and published more than seventy books on topics as diverse as magic, religion, and Alice in Wonderland. Gardner's illuminating autobiography is a candid self-portrait by the man evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould called our "single brightest beacon" for the defense of rationality and good science against mysticism and anti-intellectualism. Gardner takes readers from his childhood in Oklahoma to his varied and wide-ranging professional pursuits. He shares colorful anecdotes about the many fascinating people he met and mentored, and voices strong opinions on the subjects that matter to him most, from his love of mathematics to his uncompromising stance against pseudoscience. For Gardner, our mathematically structured universe is undiluted hocus-pocus—a marvelous enigma, in other words. Undiluted Hocus-Pocus offers a rare, intimate look at Gardner’s life and work, and the experiences that shaped both.
Download or read book Mathematics Magic and Mystery written by Martin Gardner and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Famed puzzle expert explains math behind a multitude of mystifying tricks: card tricks, stage "mind reading," coin and match tricks, counting out games, geometric dissections, etc. More than 400 tricks. 135 illustrations.
Download or read book Grooks written by Piet Hein and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science written by Martin Gardner and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-05-04 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fair, witty appraisal of cranks, quacks, and quackeries of science and pseudoscience: hollow earth, Velikovsky, orgone energy, Dianetics, flying saucers, Bridey Murphy, food and medical fads, and much more.
Download or read book The Napoleon of Notting Hill written by G. K. Chesterton and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a futuristic novel set in London in 1984. Chesterton envisions neither great technological leaps nor totalitarian suppression. Instead, England is ruled by a series of randomly selected Kings, because people have become entirely indifferent. The joker Auberon Quin is crowned and he instates elaborate costumes for every sector of London. All the city's provosts are bored with the idea except for the earnest young Adam Wayne - the Napoleon of Notting Hill.
Download or read book Magical Mathematics written by Persi Diaconis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-13 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Magical Mathematics reveals the secrets of amazing, fun-to-perform card tricks--and the profound mathematical ideas behind them--that will astound even the most accomplished magician. Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham provide easy, step-by-step instructions for each trick, explaining how to set up the effect and offering tips on what to say and do while performing it. Each card trick introduces a new mathematical idea, and varying the tricks in turn takes readers to the very threshold of today's mathematical knowledge. For example, the Gilbreath principle--a fantastic effect where the cards remain in control despite being shuffled--is found to share an intimate connection with the Mandelbrot set. Other card tricks link to the mathematical secrets of combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, topology, the Riemann hypothesis, and even Fermat's last theorem. Diaconis and Graham are mathematicians as well as skilled performers with decades of professional experience between them. In this book they share a wealth of conjuring lore, including some closely guarded secrets of legendary magicians. Magical Mathematics covers the mathematics of juggling and shows how the I Ching connects to the history of probability and magic tricks both old and new. It tells the stories--and reveals the best tricks--of the eccentric and brilliant inventors of mathematical magic. Magical Mathematics exposes old gambling secrets through the mathematics of shuffling cards, explains the classic street-gambling scam of three-card monte, traces the history of mathematical magic back to the thirteenth century and the oldest mathematical trick--and much more"-
Download or read book Out Of Control written by Kevin Kelly and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-30 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.
Download or read book The Night Is Large written by Martin Gardner and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1997-07-15 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive work of Martin Gardner's brilliant, seven-decades-long career, "The Night Is Large" collects 54 of the most significant essays by this popular writer best known for his "Mathematical Games" columns which appeared in "Scientific American" magazine for more than 25 years.
Download or read book The Last Egyptian written by Lyman Frank Baum and published by PHILADELPHIA EDWARD STERN & CO. This book was released on 2017-07-04 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Example of this ebook CHAPTER I. WHERE THE DESERT MEETS THE NILE. The sun fell hot upon the bosom of the Nile and clung there, vibrant, hesitating, yet aggressive, as if baffled in its desire to penetrate beneath the river’s lurid surface. For the Nile defies the sun, and relegates him to his own broad domain, wherein his power is undisputed. On either side the broad stream humanity shrank from Ra’s seething disc. The shaduf workers had abandoned their skin-covered buckets and bamboo poles to seek shelter from the heat beneath a straggling tree or a straw mat elevated on stalks of ripe sugar-cane. The boats of the fishermen lay in little coves, where the sails were spread as awnings to shade their crews. The fellaheen laborers had all retired to their clay huts to sleep through this fiercest period of the afternoon heat. On the Nile, however, a small steam dahabeah puffed lazily along, stemming with its slow motion the sweep of the mighty river toward the sea. The Arab stoker, naked and sweating, stood as far as possible from the little boiler and watched it with a look of absolute repulsion upon his swarthy face. The engineer, also an Arab, lay stretched upon the deck half asleep, but with both ears alert to catch any sound that might denote the fact that the straining, rickety engine was failing to perform its full duty. Back of the tiny cabin sat the dusky steersman, as naked and inert as his fellows, while under the deck awning reclined the one white man of the party, a young Englishman clothed in khaki knickerbockers and a white silk shirt well open at the throat. There were no tourists in Egypt at this season. If you find a white man on the Nile in April, he is either attached to some exploration party engaged in excavations or a government employee from Cairo, Assyut or Luxor, bent upon an urgent mission. The dahabeah was not a government boat, though, so that our Englishman was more likely to be an explorer than an official. It was evident he was no stranger to tropical climes, if we judged by his sun-browned skin and the quiet resignation to existing conditions with which he puffed his black briar and relaxed his muscular frame. He did not sleep, but lay with his head upon a low wicker rest that enabled him to sweep the banks of the Nile with his keen blue eyes. The three Arabs regarded their master from time to time with stealthy glances, in which wonder was mingled with a certain respect. The foreigner was a fool to travel during the heat of the day; no doubt of that at all. The native knows when to work and when to sleep—a lesson the European never learns. Yet this was no casual adventurer exploiting his folly, but a man who had lived among them for years, who spoke Arabic fluently and could even cipher those hieroglyphics of the dead ages which abound throughout modern Egypt. Hassan, Abdallah and Ali knew this well, for they had accompanied Winston Bey on former expeditions, and heard him translate the ugly signs graven upon the ugly stones into excellent Arabic. It was all very wonderful in its way, but quite useless and impractical, if their opinion were allowed. And the master himself was impractical. He did foolish things at all times, and sacrificed his own comfort and that of his servants in order to accomplish unnecessary objects. Had he not paid well for his whims, Winston Bey might have sought followers in vain; but the Arab will even roast himself upon the Nile on an April afternoon to obtain the much-coveted gold of the European. To be continue in this ebook...
Download or read book Bad Money written by Kevin Phillips and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his acclaimed book American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips warned of the perilous interaction of debt, financial recklessness, and the spiking cost (and growing scarcity) of oil- warnings that are proving to be frighteningly accurate. Now, in his most significant and timely book yet, Phillips takes the full measure of this crisis. They are a part of what he calls "bad money"- not just the depreciated dollar, but also the dangerous attitudes and the flawed products of wayward mega-finance. His devastating conclusion: In its hubris, the financial sector has hijacked the American economy and put our very global future at risk-and it may be too late to stop it.
Download or read book Exploring Mathematics with Your Computer written by Arthur Engel and published by American Mathematical Society. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a mathematics book, not a programming book, although it explains Pascal to beginners. It is aimed at high school students and undergraduates with a strong interest in mathematics, and teachers looking for fresh ideas. It is full of diverse mathematical ideas requiring little background. It includes a large number of challenging problems, many of which illustrate how numerical computation leads to conjectures which can then be proved by mathematical reasoning. It is assumed that readers have a PC at their disposal.
Download or read book Ten Great Ideas about Chance written by Persi Diaconis and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gamblers and mathematicians transformed the idea of chance from a mystery into the discipline of probability, setting the stage for a series of breakthroughs that enabled or transformed innumerable fields, from gambling, mathematics, statistics, economics, and finance to physics and computer science. This book tells the story of ten great ideas about chance and the thinkers who developed them, tracing the philosophical implications of these ideas as well as their mathematical impact.
Download or read book Can You Solve My Problems written by Alex Bellos and published by Guardian Faber Publishing. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A high-class puzzle book from the bestselling author of Alex's Adventures in Numberland; organised from easy-peasy to ninja level - with stories of puzzle mysteries, histories and scandals along the way this book will make your hippocampus happy.
Download or read book The Language Instinct written by Steven Pinker and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book." — New York Times Book Review The classic work on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind In The Language Instinct, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.
Download or read book Burn Witch Burn written by Abraham Merritt and published by Jovian Press. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I AM a medical man specializing in neurology and diseases of the brain. My peculiar field is abnormal psychology, and in it I am recognized as an expert. I am closely connected with two of the foremost hospitals in New York, and have received many honors in this country and abroad. I set this down, risking identification, not through egotism but because I desire to show that I was competent to observe, and competent to bring practiced scientific judgment upon, the singular events I am about to relate...
Download or read book The No Sided Professor written by Martin Gardner and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-10-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is Martin Gardner''s first collection of short stories. Culled from fiction written over the years for such magazines as Esquire and the London Mystery Magazine, The No-Sided Professor is proof that Gardner''s expertise does not stop at his scientific and mathematical works. Only Gardner can infuse short stories with the same masterful charm, wit, and philosophical brio that have brought him legions of fans through his mathematical-puzzle books and investigations into science and pseudoscience. Gardner introduces us to the "No-Sided Professor," Dr. Stanislaw Slapenarski, who by means of a kind of mathematical yoga blips himself and his nemesis into another dimension. In "At the Feet of Karl Klodhopper," Gardner tells an engrossing story of lust and murder in the art world. These and other stories reveal Gardner''s astonishingly wide range of intellectual insight and cultural acumen. The No-Sided Professor is full of tales of fantasy, humor, the bohemian life, topological wizardry, and mystery. All are stamped with the unmistakable seal of a master storyteller.
Download or read book Act of Congress written by Robert G. Kaiser and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Notable Book An eye-opening account of how Congress today really works—and how it doesn’t— Act of Congress focuses on two of the major players behind the sweeping financial reform bill enacted in response to the Great Crash of 2008: colorful, wisecracking congressman Barney Frank, and careful, insightful senator Christopher Dodd, both of whom met regularly with Robert G. Kaiser during the eighteen months they worked on the bill. In this compelling narrative, Kaiser shows how staffers play a critical role, drafting the legislation and often making the crucial deals. Kaiser’s rare insider access enabled him to illuminate the often-hidden intricacies of legislative enterprise and shows us the workings of Congress in all of its complexity, a clearer picture than any we have had of how Congress works best—or sometimes doesn’t work at all.
