Download or read book Mathematicians at war written by Laurent Mazliak and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-10-08 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Numerous scientists have taken part in the war effort during World War I, but few gave it the passionate energy of the prominent Italian mathematician Volterra. As a convinced supporter of the cause of Britain and France, he struggled vigorously to carry Italy into the war in May 1915 and then developed a frenetic activity to support the war effort, going himself to the front, even though he was 55. This activity found an adequate echo with his French colleagues Borel, Hadamard and Picard. The huge correspondence they exchanged during the war, gives an extraordinary view of these activities, and raises numerous fundamental questions about the role of a scientist, and particularly a mathematician during WW I. It also offers a vivid documentation about the intellectual life of the time ; Volterra’s and Borel’s circles in particular were extremely wide and the range of their interests was not limited to their field of specialization. The book proposes the complete transcription of the aforementioned correspondence, annotated with numerous footnotes to give details on the contents. It also offers a general historical introduction to the context of the letters and several complements on themes related to the academic exchanges between France and Italy during the war.
Download or read book Mathematics and War written by Bernhelm Booß-Bavnbek and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mathematics has for centuries been stimulated, financed and credited by military purposes. Some mathematical thoughts and mathematical technology have also been vital in war. During World War II mathematical work by the Anti-Hitler coalition was part of an aspiration to serve humanity and not help destroy it. At present, it is not an easy task to view the bellicose potentials of mathematics in a proper perspective. The book presents historical evidence and recent changes in the interaction between mathematics and the military. It discusses the new mathematically enhanced development of military technology which seems to have changed the very character of modern warfare.
Download or read book The Flying Mathematicians of World War I written by Tony Royle and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2020-10-22 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Keith Lucas was killed instantly when his BE2 biplane collided with that of a colleague over Salisbury Plain on 5 October 1916. As a captain in the Royal Flying Corps, Lucas would have known that his death was a very real risk of the work he was doing in support of Britain's war effort. But Lucas wasn't a career pilot - he was a scientist. The Flying Mathematicians of World War I details the advances and sacrifices of a select group of pioneers who left the safety of their laboratories to drive aeronautics forward at a critical moment in history. These mathematicians and scientists, including Lucas, took up the challenge to advance British aviation during the war and soon realized that they would need to learn how to fly themselves if they were to complete their mission. Set in the context of a new field of engineering, driven apace by conflict, the book follows Lucas and his colleagues as they endured freezing cockpits and engaged in aerial versions of Russian roulette in order to expand our understanding of aeronautics. Tony Royle deftly navigates this fascinating history of technical achievement, imagination, and ingenuity punctuated by bravery, persistence, and tragedy. As a result, The Flying Mathematicians of World War I makes accessible the mathematics and the personal stories that forever changed the course of aviation.
Download or read book Women Becoming Mathematicians written by Margaret Anne Marie Murray and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women mathematicians of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and how they built professional identities in the face of social and institutional obstacles.
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 Mathematics and War written by Bernhelm Booss and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2003-09-25 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mathematics has for centuries been stimulated, financed and credited by military purposes. Some mathematical thoughts and mathematical technology have also been vital in war. During World War II mathematical work by the Anti-Hitler coalition was part of an aspiration to serve humanity and not help destroy it. At present, it is not an easy task to view the bellicose potentials of mathematics in a proper perspective. The book presents historical evidence and recent changes in the interaction between mathematics and the military. It discusses the new mathematically enhanced development of military technology which seems to have changed the very character of modern warfare.
Download or read book The Calculus Wars written by Jason Socrates Bardi and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-29 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This vibrant and gripping history ultimately exposes how these twin mathematical giants (Newton, Leibniz) were proud, brilliant, at times mad, and in the end completely human.
Download or read book The War of Guns and Mathematics written by David Aubin and published by American Mathematical Society. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a long time, World War I has been shortchanged by the historiography of science. Until recently, World War II was usually considered as the defining event for the formation of the modern relationship between science and society. In this context, the effects of the First World War, by contrast, were often limited to the massive deaths of promising young scientists. By focusing on a few key places (Paris, Cambridge, Rome, Chicago, and others), the present book gathers studies representing a broad spectrum of positions adopted by mathematicians about the conflict, from militant pacifism to military, scientific, or ideological mobilization. The use of mathematics for war is thoroughly examined. This book suggests a new vision of the long-term influence of World War I on mathematics and mathematicians. Continuities and discontinuities in the structure and organization of the mathematical sciences are discussed, as well as their images in various milieux. Topics of research and the values with which they were defended are scrutinized. This book, in particular, proposes a more in-depth evaluation of the issue of modernity and modernization in mathematics. The issue of scientific international relations after the war is revisited by a close look at the situation in a few Allied countries (France, Britain, Italy, and the USA). The historiography has emphasized the place of Germany as the leading mathematical country before WWI and the absurdity of its postwar ostracism by the Allies. The studies presented here help explain how dramatically different prewar situations, prolonged interaction during the war, and new international postwar organizations led to attempts at redrafting models for mathematical developments.
Download or read book War Games written by Philipp Von Hilgers and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-03-16 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The convergence of military strategy and mathematics in war games, from medieval to modern times. For centuries, both mathematical and military thinkers have used game-like scenarios to test their visions of mastering a complex world through symbolic operations. By the end of World War I, mathematical and military discourse in Germany simultaneously discovered the game as a productive concept. Mathematics and military strategy converged in World War II when mathematicians designed fields of operation. In this book, Philipp von Hilgers examines the theory and practice of war games through history, from the medieval game boards, captured on parchment, to the paper map exercises of the Third Reich. Von Hilgers considers how and why war games came to exist: why mathematical and military thinkers created simulations of one of the most unpredictable human activities on earth. Von Hilgers begins with the medieval rythmomachia, or Battle of Numbers, then reconstructs the ideas about war and games in the baroque period. He investigates the role of George Leopold von Reiswitz's tactical war game in nineteenth-century Prussia and describes the artifact itself: a game board–topped table with drawers for game implements. He explains Clausewitz's emphasis on the “fog of war” and the accompanying element of incalculability, examines the contributions of such thinkers as Clausewitz, Leibniz, Wittgenstein, and von Neumann, and investigates the war games of the German military between the two World Wars. Baudrillard declared this to be the age of simulacra; war games stand contrariwise as simulations that have not been subsumed in absolute virtuality.
Download or read book The War of Guns and Mathematics written by David Aubin and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Title page -- Contents -- List of figures -- List of tables -- Contributors -- Foreword -- Placing World War I in the history of mathematics -- Starting Up -- Cambridge mathematicians' responses to the First World War -- The total war of Paris mathematicians -- Joining In -- Italian mathematicians and the First World War: Intellectual debates and institutional innovations -- A mobilized community: Mathematicians in the United States during the First World War -- Moving On -- Debating the place of mathematics at the École polytechnique around World War I -- "I'm just a mathematician": Why and how mathematicians collaborated with military ballisticians at Gâvre -- Why aerodynamics failed to take off in Nancy: An unexpected casualty of World War I -- Index -- Back Cover
Download or read book The Scottish Book written by R. Daniel Mauldin and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2015-11-26 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of this book updates and expands upon a historically important collection of mathematical problems first published in the United States by Birkhäuser in 1981. These problems serve as a record of the informal discussions held by a group of mathematicians at the Scottish Café in Lwów, Poland, between the two world wars. Many of them were leaders in the development of such areas as functional and real analysis, group theory, measure and set theory, probability, and topology. Finding solutions to the problems they proposed has been ongoing since World War II, with prizes offered in many cases to those who are successful. In the 35 years since the first edition published, several more problems have been fully or partially solved, but even today many still remain unsolved and several prizes remain unclaimed. In view of this, the editor has gathered new and updated commentaries on the original 193 problems. Some problems are solved for the first time in this edition. Included again in full are transcripts of lectures given by Stanislaw Ulam, Mark Kac, Antoni Zygmund, Paul Erdös, and Andrzej Granas that provide amazing insights into the mathematical environment of Lwów before World War II and the development of The Scottish Book. Also new in this edition are a brief history of the University of Wrocław’s New Scottish Book, created to revive the tradition of the original, and some selected problems from it. The Scottish Book offers a unique opportunity to communicate with the people and ideas of a time and place that had an enormous influence on the development of mathematics and try their hand on the unsolved problems. Anyone in the general mathematical community with an interest in the history of modern mathematics will find this to be an insightful and fascinating read.
Download or read book Mathematicians Fleeing from Nazi Germany written by Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on archival sources that have never been examined before, the book discusses the preeminent emigrant mathematicians of the period, including Emmy Noether, John von Neumann, Hermann Weyl, and many others. The author explores the mechanisms of the expulsion of mathematicians from Germany, the emigrants' acculturation to their new host countries, and the fates of those mathematicians forced to stay behind. The book reveals the alienation and solidarity of the emigrants, and investigates the global development of mathematics as a consequence of their radical migration.
Download or read book Mathematicians at war written by Laurent Mazliak and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-12-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Numerous scientists have taken part in the war effort during World War I, but few gave it the passionate energy of the prominent Italian mathematician Volterra. As a convinced supporter of the cause of Britain and France, he struggled vigorously to carry Italy into the war in May 1915 and then developed a frenetic activity to support the war effort, going himself to the front, even though he was 55. This activity found an adequate echo with his French colleagues Borel, Hadamard and Picard. The huge correspondence they exchanged during the war, gives an extraordinary view of these activities, and raises numerous fundamental questions about the role of a scientist, and particularly a mathematician during WW I. It also offers a vivid documentation about the intellectual life of the time ; Volterra’s and Borel’s circles in particular were extremely wide and the range of their interests was not limited to their field of specialization. The book proposes the complete transcription of the aforementioned correspondence, annotated with numerous footnotes to give details on the contents. It also offers a general historical introduction to the context of the letters and several complements on themes related to the academic exchanges between France and Italy during the war.
Download or read book The New Era in American Mathematics 1920 1950 written by Karen Hunger Parshall and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The 1920s witnessed the birth of a serious mathematical research community in America. Prior to this, mathematical research was dominated by scholars based in Europe-but World War I had made the importance of scientific and technological development clear to the American research community, resulting in the establishment of new scientific initiatives and infrastructure. Physics and chemistry were the beneficiaries of this renewed scientific focus, but the mathematical community also benefitted, and over time, began to flourish. Over the course of the next two decades, despite significant obstacles, this constellation of mathematical researchers, programs, and government infrastructure would become one of the strongest in the world. In this meticulously-researched book, Karen Parshall documents the uncertain, but ultimately successful, rise of American mathematics during this time. Drawing on research carried out in archives around the country and around the world, as well as on the secondary literature, she reveals how geopolitical circumstances shifted the course of international mathematics. She provides surveys of the mathematical research landscape in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, introduces the key players and institutions in mathematics at that time, and documents the effect of the Great Depression and the second world war on the international mathematical community. The result is a comprehensive account of the shift of mathematics' "center of gravity" to the American stage"--
Download or read book A Century of Mathematics Through the Eyes of the Monthly written by John Ewing and published by American Mathematical Soc.. This book was released on 2020-08-03 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mathematicians under the Nazis written by Sanford L. Segal and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-23 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contrary to popular belief--and despite the expulsion, emigration, or death of many German mathematicians--substantial mathematics was produced in Germany during 1933-1945. In this landmark social history of the mathematics community in Nazi Germany, Sanford Segal examines how the Nazi years affected the personal and academic lives of those German mathematicians who continued to work in Germany. The effects of the Nazi regime on the lives of mathematicians ranged from limitations on foreign contact to power struggles that rattled entire institutions, from changed work patterns to military draft, deportation, and death. Based on extensive archival research, Mathematicians under the Nazis shows how these mathematicians, variously motivated, reacted to the period's intense political pressures. It details the consequences of their actions on their colleagues and on the practice and organs of German mathematics, including its curricula, institutions, and journals. Throughout, Segal's focus is on the biographies of individuals, including mathematicians who resisted the injection of ideology into their profession, some who worked in concentration camps, and others (such as Ludwig Bieberbach) who used the "Aryanization" of their profession to further their own agendas. Some of the figures are no longer well known; others still tower over the field. All lived lives complicated by Nazi power. Presenting a wealth of previously unavailable information, this book is a large contribution to the history of mathematics--as well as a unique view of what it was like to live and work in Nazi Germany.
Download or read book Loving and Hating Mathematics written by Reuben Hersh and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-13 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mathematics is often thought of as the coldest expression of pure reason. But few subjects provoke hotter emotions--and inspire more love and hatred--than mathematics. And although math is frequently idealized as floating above the messiness of human life, its story is nothing if not human; often, it is all too human. Loving and Hating Mathematics is about the hidden human, emotional, and social forces that shape mathematics and affect the experiences of students and mathematicians. Written in a lively, accessible style, and filled with gripping stories and anecdotes, Loving and Hating Mathematics brings home the intense pleasures and pains of mathematical life. These stories challenge many myths, including the notions that mathematics is a solitary pursuit and a "young man's game," the belief that mathematicians are emotionally different from other people, and even the idea that to be a great mathematician it helps to be a little bit crazy. Reuben Hersh and Vera John-Steiner tell stories of lives in math from their very beginnings through old age, including accounts of teaching and mentoring, friendships and rivalries, love affairs and marriages, and the experiences of women and minorities in a field that has traditionally been unfriendly to both. Included here are also stories of people for whom mathematics has been an immense solace during times of crisis, war, and even imprisonment--as well as of those rare individuals driven to insanity and even murder by an obsession with math. This is a book for anyone who wants to understand why the most rational of human endeavors is at the same time one of the most emotional.
