Download or read book Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning Two Volumes in One written by George Polya and published by . This book was released on 2014-01 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2014 Reprint of 1954 American Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This two volume classic comprises two titles: "Patterns of Plausible Inference" and "Induction and Analogy in Mathematics." This is a guide to the practical art of plausible reasoning, particularly in mathematics, but also in every field of human activity. Using mathematics as the example par excellence, Polya shows how even the most rigorous deductive discipline is heavily dependent on techniques of guessing, inductive reasoning, and reasoning by analogy. In solving a problem, the answer must be guessed at before a proof can be given, and guesses are usually made from a knowledge of facts, experience, and hunches. The truly creative mathematician must be a good guesser first and a good prover afterward; many important theorems have been guessed but no proved until much later. In the same way, solutions to problems can be guessed, and a god guesser is much more likely to find a correct solution. This work might have been called "How to Become a Good Guesser."-From the Dust Jacket.
Download or read book Patterns of Plausible Inference written by George Pólya and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to the practical art of plausible reasoning, this book has relevance in every field of intellectual activity. Professor Polya, a world-famous mathematician from Stanford University, uses mathematics to show how hunches and guesses play an important part in even the most rigorously deductive science. He explains how solutions to problems can be guessed at; good guessing is often more important than rigorous deduction in finding correct solutions. Vol. II, on Patterns of Plausible Inference, attempts to develop a logic of plausibility. What makes some evidence stronger and some weaker? How does one seek evidence that will make a suspected truth more probable? These questions involve philosophy and psychology as well as mathematics.
Download or read book Street Fighting Mathematics written by Sanjoy Mahajan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-03-05 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An antidote to mathematical rigor mortis, teaching how to guess answers without needing a proof or an exact calculation. In problem solving, as in street fighting, rules are for fools: do whatever works—don't just stand there! Yet we often fear an unjustified leap even though it may land us on a correct result. Traditional mathematics teaching is largely about solving exactly stated problems exactly, yet life often hands us partly defined problems needing only moderately accurate solutions. This engaging book is an antidote to the rigor mortis brought on by too much mathematical rigor, teaching us how to guess answers without needing a proof or an exact calculation. In Street-Fighting Mathematics, Sanjoy Mahajan builds, sharpens, and demonstrates tools for educated guessing and down-and-dirty, opportunistic problem solving across diverse fields of knowledge—from mathematics to management. Mahajan describes six tools: dimensional analysis, easy cases, lumping, picture proofs, successive approximation, and reasoning by analogy. Illustrating each tool with numerous examples, he carefully separates the tool—the general principle—from the particular application so that the reader can most easily grasp the tool itself to use on problems of particular interest. Street-Fighting Mathematics grew out of a short course taught by the author at MIT for students ranging from first-year undergraduates to graduate students ready for careers in physics, mathematics, management, electrical engineering, computer science, and biology. They benefited from an approach that avoided rigor and taught them how to use mathematics to solve real problems. Street-Fighting Mathematics will appear in print and online under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Share Alike license.
Download or read book Infinite Divisibility of Probability Distributions on the Real Line written by Fred W. Steutel and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2003-10-03 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Infinite Divisibility of Probability Distributions on the Real Line reassesses classical theory and presents new developments, while focusing on divisibility with respect to convolution or addition of independent random variables. This definitive, example-rich text supplies approximately 100 examples to correspond with all major chapter topics and reviews infinite divisibility in light of the central limit problem. It contrasts infinite divisibility with finite divisibility, discusses the preservation of infinite divisibility under mixing for many classes of distributions, and investigates self-decomposability and stability on the nonnegative reals, nonnegative integers, and the reals.
Download or read book Regularity Theory for Mean Curvature Flow written by Klaus Ecker and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * Devoted to the motion of surfaces for which the normal velocity at every point is given by the mean curvature at that point; this geometric heat flow process is called mean curvature flow. * Mean curvature flow and related geometric evolution equations are important tools in mathematics and mathematical physics.
Download or read book Probability Distributions on Banach Spaces written by N Vakhania and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approach your problems from the right end It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is and begin with the answers. Then one day, that they can't see the problem. perhaps you will find the final question. G. K. Chesterton. The Scandal of Father 'The Hermit Clad in Crane Feathers' in R Brown 'The point of a Pin'. van Gulik's The Chinese Maze Murders. Growing specialization and diversification have brought a host of monographs and textbooks on increasingly specialized topics. However, the "tree" of knowledge of mathematics and related fields does not grow only by putting forth new branches. It also happens, quite often in fact, that branches which were thought to be completely disparate are suddenly seen to be related. Further, the kind and level of sophistication of mathematics applied in various sciences has changed drastically in recent years: measure theory is used (non trivially) in regional and theoretical economics; algebraic geometry interacts with physics; the Minkowsky lemma, coding theory and the structure of water meet one another in packing and covering theory; quantum fields, crystal defects and mathematical programming profit from homotopy theory; Lie algebras are relevant to filtering; and prediction and electrical engineering can use Stein spaces. And in addition to this there are such new emerging subdisciplines as "experimental mathematics", "CFD", "completely integrable systems", "chaos, synergetics and large-scale order", which are almost impossible to fit into the existing classification schemes. They draw upon widely different sections of mathematics.
Download or read book Rough Sets written by Z. Pawlak and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To-date computers are supposed to store and exploit knowledge. At least that is one of the aims of research fields such as Artificial Intelligence and Information Systems. However, the problem is to understand what knowledge means, to find ways of representing knowledge, and to specify automated machineries that can extract useful information from stored knowledge. Knowledge is something people have in their mind, and which they can express through natural language. Knowl edge is acquired not only from books, but also from observations made during experiments; in other words, from data. Changing data into knowledge is not a straightforward task. A set of data is generally disorganized, contains useless details, although it can be incomplete. Knowledge is just the opposite: organized (e.g. laying bare dependencies, or classifications), but expressed by means of a poorer language, i.e. pervaded by imprecision or even vagueness, and assuming a level of granularity. One may say that knowledge is summarized and organized data - at least the kind of knowledge that computers can store.
Download or read book Mathematical Discovery on Understanding Learning and Teaching Problem Solving written by George Pólya and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Polya was a Hungarian mathematician. Born in Budapest on 13 December 1887, his original name was Polya Gyorg. He wrote perhaps the most famous book of mathematics ever written, namely "How to Solve It." However, "How to Solve It" is not strictly speaking a math book. It is a book about how to solve problems of any kind, of which math is just one type of problem. The same techniques could in principle be used to solve any problem one encounters in life (such as how to choose the best wife ). Therefore, Polya wrote the current volume to explain how the techniques set forth in "How to Solve It" can be applied to specific areas such as geometry.
Download or read book Patterns of Plausible Inference written by G. Polya and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning Patterns of plausible inference written by G. Polya and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1990-08-23 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Here the author of How to Solve It explains how to become a "good guesser." Marked by G. Polya's simple, energetic prose and use of clever examples from a wide range of human activities, this two-volume work explores techniques of guessing, inductive reasoning, and reasoning by analogy, and the role they play in the most rigorous of deductive disciplines."--Book cover.
Download or read book Point Process Theory and Applications written by Martin Jacobsen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-07-27 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mathematically rigorous exposition of the basic theory of marked point processes and piecewise deterministic stochastic processes Point processes are constructed from scratch with detailed proofs Includes applications with examples and exercises in survival analysis, branching processes, ruin probabilities, sports (soccer), finance and risk management, and queueing theory Accessible to a wider cross-disciplinary audience
Download or read book Data and Evidence in Linguistics written by András Kertész and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-09 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of what types of data and evidence can be used is one of the most important topics in linguistics. This book is the first to comprehensively present the methodological problems associated with linguistic data and evidence. Its originality is twofold. First, the authors' approach accounts for a series of unexplained characteristics of linguistic theorising: the uncertainty and diversity of data, the role of evidence in the evaluation of hypotheses, the problem solving strategies as well as the emergence and resolution of inconsistencies. Second, the findings are obtained by the application of a new model of plausible argumentation which is also of relevance from a general argumentation theoretical point of view. All concepts and theses are systematically introduced and illustrated by a number of examples from different linguistic theories, and a detailed case-study section shows how the proposed model can be applied to specific linguistic problems.
Download or read book Multiple Scattering written by P. A. Martin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-03 with total page 13 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book Control Theory for Partial Differential Equations Volume 1 Abstract Parabolic Systems written by Irena Lasiecka and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-02-13 with total page 678 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 2000, this is the first volume of a comprehensive two-volume treatment of quadratic optimal control theory for partial differential equations over a finite or infinite time horizon, and related differential (integral) and algebraic Riccati equations. Both continuous theory and numerical approximation theory are included. The authors use an abstract space, operator theoretic approach, which is based on semigroups methods, and which is unifying across a few basic classes of evolution. The various abstract frameworks are motivated by, and ultimately directed to, partial differential equations with boundary/point control. Volume 1 includes the abstract parabolic theory for the finite and infinite cases and corresponding PDE illustrations as well as various abstract hyperbolic settings in the finite case. It presents numerous fascinating results. These volumes will appeal to graduate students and researchers in pure and applied mathematics and theoretical engineering with an interest in optimal control problems.
Download or read book Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems written by Judea Pearl and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2014-06-28 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems is a complete and accessible account of the theoretical foundations and computational methods that underlie plausible reasoning under uncertainty. The author provides a coherent explication of probability as a language for reasoning with partial belief and offers a unifying perspective on other AI approaches to uncertainty, such as the Dempster-Shafer formalism, truth maintenance systems, and nonmonotonic logic. The author distinguishes syntactic and semantic approaches to uncertainty--and offers techniques, based on belief networks, that provide a mechanism for making semantics-based systems operational. Specifically, network-propagation techniques serve as a mechanism for combining the theoretical coherence of probability theory with modern demands of reasoning-systems technology: modular declarative inputs, conceptually meaningful inferences, and parallel distributed computation. Application areas include diagnosis, forecasting, image interpretation, multi-sensor fusion, decision support systems, plan recognition, planning, speech recognition--in short, almost every task requiring that conclusions be drawn from uncertain clues and incomplete information. Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems will be of special interest to scholars and researchers in AI, decision theory, statistics, logic, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and the management sciences. Professionals in the areas of knowledge-based systems, operations research, engineering, and statistics will find theoretical and computational tools of immediate practical use. The book can also be used as an excellent text for graduate-level courses in AI, operations research, or applied probability.
Download or read book Flexagons Inside Out written by Les Pook and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flexagons are hinged polygons that have the intriguing property of displaying different pairs of faces when they are flexed. Workable paper models of flexagons are easy to make and entertaining to manipulate. Flexagons have a surprisingly complex mathematical structure and just how a flexagon works is not obvious on casual examination of a paper model. Flexagons may be appreciated at three different levels. Firstly as toys or puzzles, secondly as a recreational mathematics topic and finally as the subject of serious mathematical study. This book is written for anyone interested in puzzles or recreational maths. No previous knowledge of flexagons is assumed, and the only pre-requisite is some knowledge of elementary geometry. An attractive feature of the book is a collection of nets, with assembly instructions, for a wide range of paper models of flexagons. These are printed full size and laid out so they can be photocopied.
Download or read book The Shaping of Arithmetic after C F Gauss s Disquisitiones Arithmeticae written by Catherine Goldstein and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-02-03 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its publication, C.F. Gauss's Disquisitiones Arithmeticae (1801) has acquired an almost mythical reputation, standing as an ideal of exposition in notation, problems and methods; as a model of organisation and theory building; and as a source of mathematical inspiration. Eighteen authors - mathematicians, historians, philosophers - have collaborated in this volume to assess the impact of the Disquisitiones, in the two centuries since its publication.
