Download or read book Tales of Impossibility written by David S. Richeson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive look at four of the most famous problems in mathematics Tales of Impossibility recounts the intriguing story of the renowned problems of antiquity, four of the most famous and studied questions in the history of mathematics. First posed by the ancient Greeks, these compass and straightedge problems—squaring the circle, trisecting an angle, doubling the cube, and inscribing regular polygons in a circle—have served as ever-present muses for mathematicians for more than two millennia. David Richeson follows the trail of these problems to show that ultimately their proofs—which demonstrated the impossibility of solving them using only a compass and straightedge—depended on and resulted in the growth of mathematics. Richeson investigates how celebrated luminaries, including Euclid, Archimedes, Viète, Descartes, Newton, and Gauss, labored to understand these problems and how many major mathematical discoveries were related to their explorations. Although the problems were based in geometry, their resolutions were not, and had to wait until the nineteenth century, when mathematicians had developed the theory of real and complex numbers, analytic geometry, algebra, and calculus. Pierre Wantzel, a little-known mathematician, and Ferdinand von Lindemann, through his work on pi, finally determined the problems were impossible to solve. Along the way, Richeson provides entertaining anecdotes connected to the problems, such as how the Indiana state legislature passed a bill setting an incorrect value for pi and how Leonardo da Vinci made elegant contributions in his own study of these problems. Taking readers from the classical period to the present, Tales of Impossibility chronicles how four unsolvable problems have captivated mathematical thinking for centuries.
Download or read book The Impossibility of Religious Freedom written by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Constitution may guarantee it. But religious freedom in America is, in fact, impossible. So argues this timely and iconoclastic work by law and religion scholar Winnifred Sullivan. Sullivan uses as the backdrop for the book the trial of Warner vs. Boca Raton, a recent case concerning the laws that protect the free exercise of religion in America. The trial, for which the author served as an expert witness, concerned regulations banning certain memorials from a multiconfessional nondenominational cemetery in Boca Raton, Florida. The book portrays the unsuccessful struggle of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish families in Boca Raton to preserve the practice of placing such religious artifacts as crosses and stars of David on the graves of the city-owned burial ground. Sullivan demonstrates how, during the course of the proceeding, citizens from all walks of life and religious backgrounds were harassed to define just what their religion is. She argues that their plight points up a shocking truth: religion cannot be coherently defined for the purposes of American law, because everyone has different definitions of what religion is. Indeed, while religious freedom as a political idea was arguably once a force for tolerance, it has now become a force for intolerance, she maintains. A clear-eyed look at the laws created to protect religious freedom, this vigorously argued book offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society. It will have broad appeal not only for religion scholars, but also for anyone interested in law and the Constitution. Featuring a new preface by the author, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom offers a new take on a right deemed by many to be necessary for a free democratic society.
Download or read book The Arrow Impossibility Theorem written by Eric Maskin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kenneth Arrow's pathbreaking Òimpossibility theoremÓ was a watershed in the history of welfare economics, voting theory, and collective choice, demonstrating that there is no voting rule that satisfies the four desirable axioms of decisiveness, consensus, nondictatorship, and independence. In this book, Amartya Sen and Eric Maskin explore the implications of ArrowÕs theorem. Sen considers its ongoing utility, exploring the theoremÕs value and limitations in relation to recent research on social reasoning, while Maskin discusses how to design a voting rule that gets us closer to the idealÑgiven that achieving the ideal is impossible. The volume also contains a contextual introduction by social choice scholar Prasanta K. Pattanaik and commentaries from Joseph E. Stiglitz and Kenneth Arrow himself, as well as essays by Sen and Maskin outlining the mathematical proof and framework behind their assertions.
Download or read book Za nar written by Zachary Storch and published by . This book was released on 2015-01-17 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three million years ago, the planetary system of Za'nar's connection to the Magic-providing Void Plane was failing. To prevent the disappearance of Za'nar, a Magical Link between it and Earth was created. The Link shares much back and forth between the two systems, including their connection to the Void Plane.Now, one year after the War and the establishment of a parliamentary monarchy in Za'nar, Earth is in trouble. Sael Ageis, accomplished Magi of Za'nar, meets earthlings Klyde Vance and Fae, and together they find themselves drawn into a three million year old Magical conflict, unlocking secrets about the human race.
Download or read book Time Travel written by Nikk Effingham and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are various arguments for the metaphysical impossibility of time travel. Is it impossible because objects could then be in two places at once? Or is it impossible because some objects could bring about their own existence? In this book, Nikk Effingham contends that no such argument is sound and that time travel is metaphysically possible. His main focus is on the Grandfather Paradox: the position that time travel is impossible because someone could not go back in time and kill their own grandfather before he met their grandmother. In such a case, Effingham argues that the time traveller would have the ability to do the impossible (so they could kill their grandfather) even though those impossibilities will never come about (so they won't kill their grandfather). He then explores the ramifications of this view, discussing issues in probability and decision theory. The book ends by laying out the dangers of time travel and why, even though no time machines currently exist, we should pay extra special care ensuring that nothing, no matter how small or microscopic, ever travels in time.
Download or read book The Impossibility of Us written by Katy Upperman and published by Swoon Reads. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Told in two voices Mati, a devout Muslim from Afghanistan, and Elise, a seventeen-year-old whose brother was killed there, try to keep their budding romance secret from their families.
Download or read book The Impossibility of Perfection written by Michael Slote and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-08-18 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book utilizes feminist thought and other philosophical considerations to argue in a unique way for an ethical picture of human life that stands in marked contrast with traditional understandings. Slote here revives Isaiah Berlin's bold views on the impossibility of perfection in ways that no one has previously attempted. The Appendix describes a new kind of philosophical/ethical methodology that combines and balances (traditionally) "feminine" and "masculine" elements.
Download or read book No Time for Neutrality written by Donald K. Campbell and published by Chariot Victor Publishing. This book was released on 1981 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Impossibility in Modern Private Law written by Hüseyin Can Aksoy and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an analysis of the treatment of impossibility in modern private law. The author explains the regulation of impossibility in German, Swiss and Turkish laws with a comparative analysis of the subject under (i) the United Nations Convention on International Sale of Goods (CISG), (ii) UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts (PICC), (iii) Principles of European Contract Law (PECL also known as the Lando-Principles), (iv) Draft Common Frame of Reference (DCFR) and (iv) Common European Sales Law (CESL).
Download or read book Impossibility of Performance written by Roy Granville McElroy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 1941, provides a comprehensive analysis of impossibility in relation to contract law.
Download or read book A History of Mathematical Impossibility written by Jesper Lützen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-26 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of the most famous results in mathematics are impossibility theorems stating that something cannot be done. Good examples include the quadrature of the circle by ruler and compass, the solution of the quintic equation by radicals, Fermat's last theorem, and the impossibility of proving the parallel postulate from the other axioms of Euclidean geometry. This book tells the history of these and many other impossibility theorems starting with the ancient Greek proof of the incommensurability of the side and the diagonal in a square. Lützen argues that the role of impossibility results have changed over time. At first, they were considered rather unimportant meta-statements concerning mathematics but gradually they obtained the role of important proper mathematical results that can and should be proved. While mathematical impossibility proofs are more rigorous than impossibility arguments in other areas of life, mathematicians have employed great ingenuity to circumvent impossibilities by changing the rules of the game. For example, complex numbers were invented in order to make impossible equations solvable. In this way, impossibilities have been a strong creative force in the development of mathematics, mathematical physics, and social science.
Download or read book The Battle Against The Spirit of Impossibility written by Dr. D. K. Olukoya and published by The Battle Cry Christian Ministries. This book was released on 2016-05-02 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Battle Against the Spirit of Impossibility Uncommon battles require uncommon warfare strategies. The new warfare strategy, which the Holy Ghost has factored, is the subject of this book. Divinely inspired, well researched, carefully written, well laced with scriptures and offered in a simple readable form. This book will put paid to every form of spiritual harassment. It will surely deal a decisive blow on every enemy of your progress. Careful attention to details coupled with the aggressive use of the prayer points contained in this book will give you a permanent victory over the spirit of impossibility.
Download or read book Arrow Impossibility Theorems written by Jerry S. Kelly and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2014-05-10 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arrow Impossibility Theorems is a 10-chapter text that describes existing impossibility theorems. This book explores a number of formalizations of ethical constraints of the theorems. After an introduction to the framework and notation for Arrow impossibility theorems, this book goes on discussing some concepts and an apparatus of relations among those concepts which are important for the theorems. Other chapters present some impossibility results that serve to point out serious difficulties in some plausible escape routes from the theorems of earlier chapters. The final chapter describes important areas of research that have arisen in the collective choice field in the transition away from studying the conditions of Arrow's theorem alone to the totality of all impossibility theorems. This book is intended primarily for economists.
Download or read book Tales of Impossibility written by David S. Richeson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive look at four of the most famous problems in mathematics Tales of Impossibility recounts the intriguing story of the renowned problems of antiquity, four of the most famous and studied questions in the history of mathematics. First posed by the ancient Greeks, these compass and straightedge problems—squaring the circle, trisecting an angle, doubling the cube, and inscribing regular polygons in a circle—have served as ever-present muses for mathematicians for more than two millennia. David Richeson follows the trail of these problems to show that ultimately their proofs—which demonstrated the impossibility of solving them using only a compass and straightedge—depended on and resulted in the growth of mathematics. Richeson investigates how celebrated luminaries, including Euclid, Archimedes, Viète, Descartes, Newton, and Gauss, labored to understand these problems and how many major mathematical discoveries were related to their explorations. Although the problems were based in geometry, their resolutions were not, and had to wait until the nineteenth century, when mathematicians had developed the theory of real and complex numbers, analytic geometry, algebra, and calculus. Pierre Wantzel, a little-known mathematician, and Ferdinand von Lindemann, through his work on pi, finally determined the problems were impossible to solve. Along the way, Richeson provides entertaining anecdotes connected to the problems, such as how the Indiana state legislature passed a bill setting an incorrect value for pi and how Leonardo da Vinci made elegant contributions in his own study of these problems. Taking readers from the classical period to the present, Tales of Impossibility chronicles how four unsolvable problems have captivated mathematical thinking for centuries.
Download or read book The Impossibility of Squaring the Circle in the 17th Century written by Davide Crippa and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-03-06 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about James Gregory’s attempt to prove that the quadrature of the circle, the ellipse and the hyperbola cannot be found algebraically. Additonally, the subsequent debates that ensued between Gregory, Christiaan Huygens and G.W. Leibniz are presented and analyzed. These debates eventually culminated with the impossibility result that Leibniz appended to his unpublished treatise on the arithmetical quadrature of the circle. The author shows how the controversy around the possibility of solving the quadrature of the circle by certain means (algebraic curves) pointed to metamathematical issues, particularly to the completeness of algebra with respect to geometry. In other words, the question underlying the debate on the solvability of the circle-squaring problem may be thus phrased: can finite polynomial equations describe any geometrical quantity? As the study reveals, this question was central in the early days of calculus, when transcendental quantities and operations entered the stage. Undergraduate and graduate students in the history of science, in philosophy and in mathematics will find this book appealing as well as mathematicians and historians with broad interests in the history of mathematics.
Download or read book The Impossibility of Motherhood written by Patrice DiQuinzio and published by Routledge. This book was released on 1999-09-13 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An adequate analysis of experiences and situations specific to women, especially mothering, requires consideration of women's difference. A focus on women's difference, however, jeopardizes feminism's claims of women's equal individualist subjectivity, and risks recuperating the inequality and oppression of women, especially the view that all women should be mothers, want to be mothers, and are most happy being mothers. This book considers how thinkers including Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Nancy Choderow and Adrienne Rich struggle to negotiate this dilemma of difference in analyzing mothering, encompassing the paradoxes concerning embodiment, gender and representation they encounter. Patrice Di Quinzio shows that mothering has been and will continue to be an intractable problem for feminist theory itself, and suggests the political usefulness of an explicitly paradoxical politics of mothering.
Download or read book The Impossibility of Perfection written by Michael Slote and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people think that the difficulty of balancing career and personal/family relationships is the fault of present-day society or is due to their own inadequacies. But in this major new book, eminent moral philosopher Michael Slote argues that the difficulty runs much deeper, that it is due to the essential nature of the divergent goods involved in this kind of choice. He shows more generally that perfect human happiness and perfect virtue are impossible in principle, a view originally enunciated by Isaiah Berlin, but much more thoroughly and synoptically defended here than ever before. Ancient Greek and modern-day Enlightenment thought typically assumed that perfection was possible, and this is also true of Romanticism and of most recent ethical theory. But if, as Slote maintains, imperfection is inevitable, then our inherited categories of virtue and personal good are far too limited and unqualified to allow us to understand and cope with the richer and more complex life that characterizes today's world. And The Impossibility of Perfection argues in particular that we need some new notions, new distinctions, and even new philosophical methods in order to distill some of the ethical insights of recent feminist thought and arrive at a fuller and more realistic picture of ethical phenomena.
