The following day, her story began appearing in Irish papers and soon after was splashed across the front page of the London Times, complete with a photo of Sarah and a caption calling her "brilliant." Just sixteen, she was a mathematician with an international reputation. IN CODE is a heartwarming story that will have readers cheering Sarah on. Originally published in England and cowritten with her mathematician father, David Flannery, IN CODE is "a wonderfully moving story about the thrill of the mathematical chase" (Nature) and "a paean to intellectual adventure" (Times Educational Supplement). A memoir in mathematics, it is all about how a girl next door, nurtured by her family, moved from the simple math puzzles that were the staple of dinnertime conversation to prime numbers, the Sieve of Eratosthenes, Fermat's Little Theorem, googols-and finally into her breathtaking algorithm. Parallel with each step is a modest girl's own self-discovery-her values, her burning curiosity, the joy of persistence, and, above all, her love for her family.

    In this collection of landmark mathematical works, editor Stephen Hawking has assembled the greatest feats humans have ever accomplished using just numbers and their brains.

    This notion follows us into adulthood, where we tend to simply accept these established beliefs about our skillsets (i.e. that we don’t have “a math brain” or that we aren’t “the creative type”). These damaging—and as new science has revealed, false—assumptions have influenced all of us at some time, affecting our confidence and willingness to try new things and limiting our choices, and, ultimately, our futures.Stanford University professor, bestselling author, and acclaimed educator Jo Boaler has spent decades studying the impact of beliefs and bias on education. In Limitless Mind , she explodes these myths and reveals the six keys to unlocking our boundless learning potential. Her research proves that those who achieve at the highest levels do not do so because of a genetic inclination toward any one skill but because of the keys that she reveals in the book. Our brains are not “fixed,” but entirely capable of change, growth, adaptability, and rewiring. Want to be fluent in mathematics? Learn a foreign language? Play the guitar? Write a book? The truth is not only that anyone at any age can learn anything, but the act of learning itself fundamentally changes who we are, and as Boaler argues so elegantly in the pages of this book, what we go on to achieve.

    In this unconventional introduction, physicist Leonard Susskind and hacker-scientist George Hrabovsky offer a first course in physics and associated math for the ardent amateur. Unlike most popular physics books—which give readers a taste of what physicists know but shy away from equations or math—Susskind and Hrabovsky actually teach the skills you need to do physics, beginning with classical mechanics, yourself. Based on Susskind's enormously popular Stanford University-based (and YouTube-featured) continuing-education course, the authors cover the minimum—the theoretical minimum of the title—that readers need to master to study more advanced topics.An alternative to the conventional go-to-college method, The Theoretical Minimum provides a tool kit for amateur scientists to learn physics at their own pace.

    As teen math prodigy Agnijo Banerjee and his teacher David Darling reveal, complex math surrounds us. If we think long enough about the universe, we're left not with material stuff, but a ghostly and beautiful set of equations. Packed with puzzles and paradoxes, mind-bending concepts, and surprising solutions, Weird Math leads us from a lyrical exploration of mathematics in our universe to profound questions about God, chance, and infinity. A magical introduction to the mysteries of math, it will entrance beginners and seasoned mathematicians alike.

    The stories show that, as James Gleick puts it in the foreword, "inspiration strikes willy-nilly." One researcher thinks of quantum chaotic systems at a bus stop; another suddenly realizes a path to proving a theorem of number theory while in a friend's backyard; a statistician has a "bathroom sink epiphany" and discovers the key to solving the Gaussian correlation inequality. Readers of The Prime Number Conspiracy, says Quanta editor-in-chief Thomas Lin, are headed on "breathtaking intellectual journeys to the bleeding edge of discovery strapped to the narrative rocket of humanity's never-ending pursuit of knowledge."Quanta is the only popular publication that offers in-depth coverage of the latest breakthroughs in understanding our mathematical universe. It communicates mathematics by taking it seriously, wrestling with difficult concepts and clearly explaining them in a way that speaks to our innate curiosity about our world and ourselves. Readers of this volume will learn that prime numbers have decided preferences about the final digits of the primes that immediately follow them (the "conspiracy" of the title); consider whether math is the universal language of nature (allowing for "a unified theory of randomness"); discover surprising solutions (including a pentagon tiling proof that solves a century-old math problem); ponder the limits of computation; measure infinity; and explore the eternal question "Is mathematics good for you?"ContributorsAriel Bleicher, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Kevin Hartnett, Erica Klarreich, Thomas Lin, John Pavlus, Siobhan Roberts, Natalie WolchoverCopublished with Quanta Magazine

    How to make sense of them? The answer lies in mathematical modeling, a science with applications in a host of biological systems. Soccermatics brings the two together in a fascinating, mind-bending synthesis.What's the similarity between an ant colony and Total Football, Dutch style? How is the Barcelona midfield linked geometrically? And how can we relate the mechanics of a Mexican Wave to the singing of cicadas in an Australian valley? Welcome to the world of mathematical modeling, expressed brilliantly by David Sumpter through the prism of soccer. Soccer is indeed more than a game and this book is packed with game theory. After reading it, you will forever watch the game with new eyes.

    As we dream with him, we are taken further and further into mathematical theory, where ideas eventually take flight, until everyone--from those who fumble over fractions to those who solve complex equations in their heads--winds up marveling at what numbers can do.Hans Magnus Enzensberger is a true polymath, the kind of superb intellectual who loves thinking and marshals all of his charm and wit to share his passions with the world. In The Number Devil, he brings together the surreal logic of Alice in Wonderland and the existential geometry of Flatland with the kind of math everyone would love, if only they had a number devil to teach them.

    Originally marked out by eye and later by use of a stretched cord, in time these forms came to be made with the simple tools of ruler and compass.This small book introduces the origins and basic principles of geometric constructions using these ancient tools, before going on to cover dozens of geometric forms, from practical fundamentals to more challenging constructions.

    Reveals mathematics' great power as an alternative language for understanding things and explores such concepts as logic as a computing tool, digital versus analog processes and communication as information transmission.

    In those twelve months, Einstein shattered many cherished scientific beliefs with five extraordinary papers that would establish him as the world's leading physicist. This book brings those papers together in an accessible format. The best-known papers are the two that founded special relativity: On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies and Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content? In the former, Einstein showed that absolute time had to be replaced by a new absolute: the speed of light. In the second, he asserted the equivalence of mass and energy, which would lead to the famous formula E = mc2.The book also includes On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light, in which Einstein challenged the wave theory of light, suggesting that light could also be regarded as a collection of particles. This helped to open the door to a whole new world--that of quantum physics. For ideas in this paper, he won the Nobel Prize in 1921.The fourth paper also led to a Nobel Prize, although for another scientist, Jean Perrin. On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat concerns the Brownian motion of such particles. With profound insight, Einstein blended ideas from kinetic theory and classical hydrodynamics to derive an equation for the mean free path of such particles as a function of the time, which Perrin confirmed experimentally. The fifth paper, A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions, was Einstein's doctoral dissertation, and remains among his most cited articles. It shows how to calculate Avogadro's number and the size of molecules.These papers, presented in a modern English translation, are essential reading for any physicist, mathematician, or astrophysicist. Far more than just a collection of scientific articles, this book presents work that is among the high points of human achievement and marks a watershed in the history of science. Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the miraculous year, this new paperback edition includes an introduction by John Stachel, which focuses on the personal aspects of Einstein's youth that facilitated and led up to the miraculous year.

    For all ages and all levels of difficulty, these puzzles range from those that can be solved in minutes to those that will beguile for hours.

    In The Universe and the Teacup, K. C. Cole demystifies mathematics and shows us-with humor and wonderfully accessible stories-why math need not be frightening. Using the O. J. Simpson trial, the bell curve, and Emmy Noether, the nineteenth-century woman scientist whose work was essential for Einstein's theory of relativity, Cole helps us see that more than just being a tool, math is a key to understanding the beauty of everything from rainbows to relativity.