Burn Math Class: And Reinvent Mathematics for Yourself


Jason Wilkes - 2016
    In Burn Math Class, Jason Wilkes takes the traditional approach to how we learn math -- with its unwelcoming textbooks, unexplained rules, and authoritarian assertions-and sets it on fire. Focusing on how mathematics is created rather than on mathematical facts, Wilkes teaches the subject in a way that requires no memorization and no prior knowledge beyond addition and multiplication. From these simple foundations, Burn Math Class shows how mathematics can be (re)invented from scratch without preexisting textbooks and courses. We can discover math on our own through experimentation and failure, without appealing to any outside authority. When math is created free from arcane notations and pretentious jargon that hide the simplicity of mathematical concepts, it can be understood organically -- and it becomes fun! Following this unconventional approach, Burn Math Class leads the reader from the basics of elementary arithmetic to various "advanced" topics, such as time-dilation in special relativity, Taylor series, and calculus in infinite-dimensional spaces. Along the way, Wilkes argues that orthodox mathematics education has been teaching the subject backward: calculus belongs before many of its so-called prerequisites, and those prerequisites cannot be fully understood without calculus. Like the smartest, craziest teacher you've ever had, Wilkes guides you on an adventure in mathematical creation that will radically change the way you think about math. Revealing the beauty and simplicity of this timeless subject, Burn Math Class turns everything that seems difficult about mathematics upside down and sideways until you understand just how easy math can be.

How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Stats in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them)


Tom Chivers - 2021
    Sometimes it’ll be obvious – ‘X people develop cancer every year’ – and sometimes less obvious – ‘How smartphones destroyed a generation’. Statistics are an immensely powerful tool for understanding the world; the best tool we have. But in the wrong hands, they can be dangerous.This book will help you spot common mistakes and tricks that can mislead you into thinking that small numbers are big, or unimportant changes are important. It will show you how the numbers you read are made – you’ll learn about how surveys with small or biased samples can generate wrong answers, and why ice cream doesn’t cause drownings.We are surrounded by numbers and data, and it has never been more important to separate the good from the bad, the true from the false. HOW TO READ NUMBERS is a vital guide that will help you understand when and how to trust the numbers in the news – and, just as importantly, when not to.

Introducing Relativity: A Graphic Guide


Bruce Bassett - 2002
    Beginning near the speed of light and proceeding to explorations of space-time and curved spaces, "Introducing Relativity" plots a visually accessible course through the thought experiments that have given shape to contemporary physics. Scientists from Newton to Hawking add their unique contributions to this story, as we encounter Einstein's astounding vision of gravity as the curvature of space-time and arrive at the breathtakingly beautiful field equations. Einstein's legacy is reviewed in the most advanced frontiers of physics today - black holes, gravitational waves, the accelerating universe and string theory. This is a superlative, fascinating graphic account of Einstein's strange world and how his legacy has been built upon since.

Who Is Fourier? a Mathematical Adventure


Transnational College of Lex - 1995
    This is done in a way that is not only easy to understand, but is actually fun! Professors and engineers, with high school and college students following closely, comprise the largest percentage of our readers. It is a must-have for anyone interested in music, mathematics, physics, engineering, or complex science. Dr. Yoichiro Nambu, 2008 Nobel Prize Winner in Physics, served as a senior adviser to the English version of Who is Fourier? A Mathematical Adventure.

Invertebrate Zoology


Robert D. Barnes - 1963
    This thorough revision provides a survey by groups, emphasizing adaptive morphology and physiology, while covering anatomical ground plans and basic developmental patterns. New co-author Richard Fox brings to the revision his expertise as an ecologist, offering a good balance to Ruppert's background as a functional morphologist. Rich illustrations and extensive citations make the book extremely valuable as a teaching tool and reference source.

Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified


Richard Wolfson - 2002
    Drawing from years of teaching modern physics to nonscientists, Wolfson explains in a lively, conversational style the simple principles underlying Einstein's theory.Relativity, Wolfson shows, gave us a new view of space and time, opening the door to questions about their flexible nature: Is the universe finite or infinite? Will it expand forever or eventually collapse in a "big crunch"? Is time travel possible? What goes on inside a black hole? How does gravity really work? These questions at the forefront of twenty-first-century physics are all rooted in the profound and sweeping vision of Albert Einstein's early twentieth-century theory. Wolfson leads his readers on an intellectual journey that culminates in a universe made almost unimaginably rich by the principles that Einstein first discovered.

Chemical Principles: The Quest for Insight


Peter Atkins - 1999
    Unlike other texts, it begins with a detailed picture of the atom then builds toward chemistry's frontier, continually demonstrating how to solve problems, think about nature and matter, and visualize chemical concepts in the same ways as working chemists. The new edition incorporates features that extend the book's emphasis on modern techniques and applications while strengthening its problem solving approach. Atkins/Jones is the only book for this course featuring integrated book specific media that provides students with effective study help via a variety of electronic tools. The website at http: //www.whfreeman.com/chemicalprinciples3e has been developed simultaneously with the text and offers a range of tools for problem solving and chemical exploration

Einstein's Miraculous Year


John J. Stachel - 1998
    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.

Gravitation and Cosmology: Principles and Applications of the General Theory of Relativity


Steven Weinberg - 1972
    Unique in basing relativity on the Principle of Equivalence of Gravitation and Inertia over Riemannian geometry, this book explores relativity experiments and observational cosmology to provide a sound foundation upon which analyses can be made. Covering special and general relativity, tensor analysis, gravitation, curvature, and more, this book provides an engaging, insightful introduction to the forces that shape the universe.

Dr. Quantum's Little Book Of Big Ideas: Where Science Meets Spirit


Fred Alan Wolf - 2005
    Quantum) is, as Deepak Chopra states, "one of the most important pioneers in the field of consciousness." Featured in the wordofmouth indie hit, What the Bleep Do We Know?!, Dr. Wolf is a physicist who knows how to put complex sciencebased ideas into terms that even sciencephobes can understand. With clarity and a sense of humor, Dr. Quantum presents Big Ideas in the form of both short quotes and longer excerpts and covers topics ranging from the construction of our everyday reality to our relationship to one another. Dr. Quantum's Little Book of Big Ideas is a perfect gift for anyone interested in the realm where science meets spirit.

From Shadow Party to Shadow Government: George Soros and the Effort to Radically Change America


John Perazzo - 2011
    Since David Horowitz wrote “The Shadow Party” in 2007, there has been a major breakthrough in the progression of Soros’ plan to racially change American institutions – he has succeeded in subverting and taking over the Democratic Party itself. Though Soros has carefully hidden his goals under the cloak of his philanthropy, Horowitz and John Perazzo expose Soros’ radical agenda in this booklet and show how his philanthropies actually work to advance his leftwing causes. Understanding the Soros agenda is critical for understanding and defeating the Obama agenda, because they have, in effect, become one in the same.

The New Quotable Einstein


Albert Einstein - 2005
    Tens of thousands of readers have enjoyed The Quotable Einstein and The Expanded Quotable Einstein, with translations into twenty-two languages. This updated edition--which appears on the 100th anniversary of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and the 50th anniversary of Einstein's death--offers more than 300 new quotations, or over 1,200 altogether. Nearly all are by Einstein himself and a few are about the self-professed lone wolf Time magazine named Man of the Century at the turn of the millennium.The New Quotable Einstein also includes a new section, On Aging, and fresh material has been added to the appendix-from a touching account by Helen Dukas of Einstein's last days to a day-by-day summary of Johanna Fantova's telephone conversations with Einstein during the final year and a half of his life.Also included are a poem called Einstein, by Robert Service; and three virtually unknown verses to the song As Time Goes By (made famous in the movie Casablanca) that refer to Einstein. New photographs have been selected to introduce each section of the book.Through well-documented quotations and supplementary information, The New Quotable Einstein provides a bigger and better biographical account of this multifaceted man-as son, husband, father, lover, scientist, philosopher, aging widower, humanitarian, and friend. It shows us even more vividly why the real and imagined Einstein continues to fascinate people across the world into the twenty-first century.300-plus new quotations, more than 1,200 in allA day-by-day summary of Johanna Fantova's phone conversations with Einstein toward the end of his lifeA touching account of Einstein's last daysA new section, On AgingThree virtually unknown original verses of the song As Time Goes By (from the movie Casablanca) that refer to EinsteinRobert Service's poem Einstein-- "New Scientist"

The Big Questions: Tackling the Problems of Philosophy with Ideas from Mathematics, Economics and Physics


Steven E. Landsburg - 2009
    Stimulating, illuminating, and always surprising, The Big Questions challenges readers to re-evaluate their most fundamental beliefs and reveals the relationship between the loftiest philosophical quests and our everyday lives.

First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time


Emma Chapman - 2020
    There's a lot for astronomers to be smug about. But when it comes to understanding how the Universe began and grew up we are literally in the dark ages. In effect, we are missing the first one billion years from the timeline of the Universe.This brief but far-reaching period in the Universe's history, known to astrophysicists as the 'Epoch of Reionisation', represents the start of the cosmos as we experience it today. The time when the very first stars burst into life, when darkness gave way to light. After hundreds of millions of years of dark, uneventful expansion, one by the one these stars suddenly came into being. This was the point at which the chaos of the Big Bang first began to yield to the order of galaxies, black holes and stars, kick-starting the pathway to planets, to comets, to moons, and to life itself.Incorporating the very latest research into this branch of astrophysics, this book sheds light on this time of darkness, telling the story of these first stars, hundreds of times the size of the Sun and a million times brighter, lonely giants that lived fast and died young in powerful explosions that seeded the Universe with the heavy elements that we are made of. Emma Chapman tells us how these stars formed, why they were so unusual, and what they can teach us about the Universe today. She also offers a first-hand look at the immense telescopes about to come on line to peer into the past, searching for the echoes and footprints of these stars, to take this period in the Universe's history from the realm of theoretical physics towards the wonder of observational astronomy.

Einstein's Heroes: Imagining the World Through the Language of Mathematics


Robyn Arianrhod - 2004
    Einstein's Heroes takes you on a journey of discovery about just such a miraculous language--the language of mathematics--one of humanity's mostamazing accomplishments. Blending science, history, and biography, this remarkable book reveals the mysteries of mathematics, focusing on the life and work of three of Albert Einstein's heroes: Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, and especially James Clerk Maxwell, whose work directly inspired the theory of relativity. RobynArianrhod bridges the gap between science and literature, portraying mathematics as a language and arguing that a physical theory is a work of imagination involving the elegant and clever use of this language. The heart of the book illuminates how Maxwell, using the language of mathematics in a newand radical way, resolved the seemingly insoluble controversy between Faraday's idea of lines of force and Newton's theory of action-at-a-distance. In so doing, Maxwell not only produced the first complete mathematical description of electromagnetism, but actually predicted the existence of theradio wave, teasing it out of the mathematical language itself. Here then is a fascinating look at mathematics: its colorful characters, its historical intrigues, and above all its role as the uncannily accurate language of nature.