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: “A captivating story, not just an intellectual quest but a personal one . . . gripping [and] filled with the passion and wonder of numbers.” —The New York Times Virtually everything in our lives is digital, numerical, or quantified. But 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 the saga of Amir Aczel’s lifelong obsession: to find the original sources of our numerals, perhaps the greatest abstraction the human mind has ever created. 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 Babylonian cuneiform numbers, followed by Greek and Roman letter numerals. Then Aczel asks: 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 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. “A historical adventure that doubles as a surprisingly engaging math lesson . . . rip-roaring exploits and escapades.” —Publishers Weekly

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 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 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 The Who by Numbers written by Steve Grantley and published by Helter Skelter Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerging from the mid-1960s R&B mod scene with furious teenage anthems like 'My Generation', The Who were the wildest, angriest and loudest kids on the block. And in spite of Townshend's most famous line - 'hope I die before I get old' - and unlike so many of their rivals, The Who lived to forge more mature works in the late 1960s and the 1970s with the phenomenal success of their pioneering rock opera, Tommy, their revered song collection Who's Next and Townshend's mod masterpiece Quadrophenia.

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 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 The Hueys in None The Number written by Oliver Jeffers and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn to count with the #1 New York Times bestselling artist of The Day the Crayons Quit and his hilarious cast of Hueys! "Is none a number?" you might ask. I'm glad you did. The answer is Yes! For example, how many lumps of cheese do you see next to you? The answer, depending on where you are, is likely "none." Counting with the reader all the way up to ten, the Hueys explain numbers as only they can. Such as: The number 4 is the number of tantrums thrown by Dave every day. 7 is the number of oranges balanced on things. And 9 is the number of seagulls who attacked Frank's French fries. Together they make quite a spectacle. But when you take away all of these fun illustrations in the book? You're left with none! This funny and accessible counting book from #1 New York Times bestseller Oliver Jeffers (The Day the Crayons Quit; This Moose Belongs to Me) gives the Hueys one more reason to be every young child's best friends. Praise for NONE THE NUMBER "Delightfully droll and enlightening . . . . The illustrations, 'made with pencils and a bit of color' on large white pages, are deceptively simple and ridiculously funny."--School Library Journal

Download or read book I Am Not a Number written by Jenny Kay Dupuis and published by Second Story Press. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When eight-year-old Irene is removed from her First Nations family to live in a residential school she is confused, frightened, and terribly homesick. She tries to remember who she is and where she came from, despite the efforts of the nuns who are in charge at the school and who tell her that she is not to use her own name but instead use the number they have assigned to her. When she goes home for summer holidays, Irene's parents decide never to send her and her brothers away again. But where will they hide? And what will happen when her parents disobey the law? Based on the life of co-author Jenny Kay Dupuis’ grandmother, I Am Not a Number is a hugely necessary book that brings a terrible part of Canada’s history to light in a way that children can learn from and relate to.

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 An Imaginary Tale written by Paul Nahin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-22 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today complex numbers have such widespread practical use--from electrical engineering to aeronautics--that few people would expect the story behind their derivation to be filled with adventure and enigma. In An Imaginary Tale, Paul Nahin tells the 2000-year-old history of one of mathematics' most elusive numbers, the square root of minus one, also known as i. He recreates the baffling mathematical problems that conjured it up, and the colorful characters who tried to solve them. In 1878, when two brothers stole a mathematical papyrus from the ancient Egyptian burial site in the Valley of Kings, they led scholars to the earliest known occurrence of the square root of a negative number. The papyrus offered a specific numerical example of how to calculate the volume of a truncated square pyramid, which implied the need for i. In the first century, the mathematician-engineer Heron of Alexandria encountered I in a separate project, but fudged the arithmetic; medieval mathematicians stumbled upon the concept while grappling with the meaning of negative numbers, but dismissed their square roots as nonsense. By the time of Descartes, a theoretical use for these elusive square roots--now called "imaginary numbers"--was suspected, but efforts to solve them led to intense, bitter debates. The notorious i finally won acceptance and was put to use in complex analysis and theoretical physics in Napoleonic times. Addressing readers with both a general and scholarly interest in mathematics, Nahin weaves into this narrative entertaining historical facts and mathematical discussions, including the application of complex numbers and functions to important problems, such as Kepler's laws of planetary motion and ac electrical circuits. This book can be read as an engaging history, almost a biography, of one of the most evasive and pervasive "numbers" in all of mathematics. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

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 World According to Fannie Davis written by Bridgett M. Davis and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As seen on the Today Show: This true story of an unforgettable mother, her devoted daughter, and their life in the Detroit numbers of the 1960s and 1970s highlights "the outstanding humanity of black America" (James McBride). In 1958, the very same year that an unknown songwriter named Berry Gordy borrowed $800 to found Motown Records, a pretty young mother from Nashville, Tennessee, borrowed $100 from her brother to run a numbers racket out of her home. That woman was Fannie Davis, Bridgett M. Davis's mother. Part bookie, part banker, mother, wife, and granddaughter of slaves, Fannie ran her numbers business for thirty-four years, doing what it took to survive in a legitimate business that just happened to be illegal. She created a loving, joyful home, sent her children to the best schools, bought them the best clothes, mothered them to the highest standard, and when the tragedy of urban life struck, soldiered on with her stated belief: "Dying is easy. Living takes guts." A daughter's moving homage to an extraordinary parent, The World According to Fannie Davis is also the suspenseful, unforgettable story about the lengths to which a mother will go to "make a way out of no way" and provide a prosperous life for her family -- and how those sacrifices resonate over time.

Download or read book Narrative and Numbers written by Aswath Damodaran and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can a company that has never turned a profit have a multibillion dollar valuation? Why do some start-ups attract large investments while others do not? Aswath Damodaran, finance professor and experienced investor, argues that the power of story drives corporate value, adding substance to numbers and persuading even cautious investors to take risks. In business, there are the storytellers who spin compelling narratives and the number-crunchers who construct meaningful models and accounts. Both are essential to success, but only by combining the two, Damodaran argues, can a business deliver and sustain value. Through a range of case studies, Narrative and Numbers describes how storytellers can better incorporate and narrate numbers and how number-crunchers can calculate more imaginative models that withstand scrutiny. Damodaran considers Uber's debut and how narrative is key to understanding different valuations. He investigates why Twitter and Facebook were valued in the billions of dollars at their public offerings, and why one (Twitter) has stagnated while the other (Facebook) has grown. Damodaran also looks at more established business models such as Apple and Amazon to demonstrate how a company's history can both enrich and constrain its narrative. And through Vale, a global Brazil-based mining company, he shows the influence of external narrative, and how country, commodity, and currency can shape a company's story. Narrative and Numbers reveals the benefits, challenges, and pitfalls of weaving narratives around numbers and how one can best test a story's plausibility.

Download or read book Numbers Don t Lie written by Vaclav Smil and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Vaclav Smil is my favorite author… Numbers Don't Lie takes everything that makes his writing great and boils it down into an easy-to-read format. I unabashedly recommend this book to anyone who loves learning."--Bill Gates, GatesNotes From the author of How the World Really Works, an essential guide to understanding how numbers reveal the true state of our world--exploring a wide range of topics including energy, the environment, technology, transportation, and food production. Vaclav Smil's mission is to make facts matter. An environmental scientist, policy analyst, and a hugely prolific author, he is Bill Gates' go-to guy for making sense of our world. In Numbers Don't Lie, Smil answers questions such as: What's worse for the environment--your car or your phone? How much do the world's cows weigh (and what does it matter)? And what makes people happy? From data about our societies and populations, through measures of the fuels and foods that energize them, to the impact of transportation and inventions of our modern world--and how all of this affects the planet itself--in Numbers Don't Lie, Vaclav Smil takes us on a fact-finding adventure, using surprising statistics and illuminating graphs to challenge conventional thinking. Packed with fascinating information and memorable examples, Numbers Don't Lie reveals how the US is leading a rising worldwide trend in chicken consumption, that vaccination yields the best return on investment, and why electric cars aren't as great as we think (yet). Urgent and essential, with a mix of science, history, and wit--all in bite-sized chapters on a broad range of topics--Numbers Don't Lie inspires readers to interrogate what they take to be true.

Download or read book The Irrationals written by Julian Havil and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-22 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first popular history of irrational numbers and their discoverers, from ancient Greece to the twenty-first century The ancient Greeks discovered them, but it wasn't until the nineteenth century that irrational numbers were properly understood and rigorously defined, and even today not all their mysteries have been revealed. In The Irrationals, the first popular and comprehensive book on the subject, Julian Havil tells the story of irrational numbers and the mathematicians who have tackled their challenges, from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Along the way, he explains why irrational numbers are surprisingly difficult to define—and why so many questions still surround them. Fascinating and illuminating, this is a book for everyone who loves math and the history behind it.