Book picks similar to
Secrets of Infinity: 150 Answers to an Enigma by Antonio Olivar
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Complexity and Chaos
Roger White - 1994
But scientists in the late 20th century have found patterns in things formerly thought to be chaotic; their theories help explain the unstable irregular yet highly structured features of everyday experience. It now seems likely that randomness and chaos play an essential role in the evolution of the living world-and of intelligence itself. Script by Dr. Roger White.
Introduction to Quantum Mechanics
David J. Griffiths - 1994
The book s two-part coverage organizes topics under basic theory, and assembles an arsenal of approximation schemes with illustrative applications. For physicists and engineers. "
13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time
Michael Brooks - 2008
The effects of homeopathy don’t go away under rigorous scientific conditions. The laws of nature aren’t what they used to be. Thirty years on, no one has an explanation for a seemingly intelligent signal received from outer space. The US Department of Energy is re-examining cold fusion because the experimental evidence seems too solid to ignore. The placebo effect is put to work in medicine while doctors can’t agree whether it even exists.In an age when science is supposed to be king, scientists are beset by experimental results they simply can’t explain. But, if the past is anything to go by, these anomalies contain the seeds of future revolutions. While taking readers on an entertaining tour d’horizon of the strangest of scientific findings – involving everything from our lack of free will to Martian methane that offers new evidence of life on the planet – Michael Brooks argues that the things we don’t understand are the key to what we are about to discover.This mind-boggling but entirely accessible survey of the outer limits of human knowledge is based on a short article by Michael Brooks for New Scientist magazine. It became the sixth most circulated story on the internet in 2005, and provoked widespread comment and compliments (Google “13 things that do not make sense” to see).Michael Brooks has now dug deeply into those mysteries, with extraordinary results.
Connecting with Students Online: Strategies for Remote Teaching & Learning
Jennifer Serravallo - 2020
Now that you're making the shift to online teaching, it's time to answer your biggest questions about remote, digitally based instruction:How do I build and nurture relationships with students and their at-home adults from afar? How do I adapt my best teaching to an online setting? How do I keep a focus on students and their needs when they aren't in front of me? Jennifer Serravallo's Connecting with Students Online gives you concise, doable answers based on her own experiences and those of the teachers, administrators, and coaches she has communicated with during the pandemic. Focusing on the vital importance of the teacher-student connection, Jen guides you to:effectively prioritize what matters most during remote, online instruction schedule your day and your students' to maximize teaching and learning (and avoid burnout) streamline curricular units and roll them out digitally record highly engaging short lessons that students will enjoy and learn from confer, working with small groups, and drive learning through independent practice partner with the adults in a student's home to support your work with their child. Featuring simplified, commonsense suggestions, 55 step-by-step teaching strategies, and video examples of Jen conferring and working with small groups, Connecting with Students Online helps new teachers, teachers new to technology, or anyone who wants to better understand the essence of effective online instruction. Along the way Jen addresses crucial topics including assessment and progress monitoring, student engagement and accountability, using anchor charts and visuals, getting books into students' hands, teaching subject-area content, and avoiding teacher burnout.During this pandemic crisis turn to one of education's most trusted teaching voices to help you restart or maintain students' progress. Jennifer Serravallo's Connecting with Students Online is of-the-moment, grounded in important research, informed by experience, and designed to get you teaching well-and confidently-as quickly as possible. Jen will be donating a portion of the proceeds from Connecting with Students Online to organizations that help children directly impacted by COVID-19.
Five Equations That Changed the World
Michael Guillen - 1995
Michael Guillen, known to millions as the science editor of ABC's Good Morning America, tells the fascinating stories behind five mathematical equations. As a regular contributor to daytime's most popular morning news show and an instructor at Harvard University, Dr. Michael Guillen has earned the respect of millions as a clear and entertaining guide to the exhilarating world of science and mathematics. Now Dr. Guillen unravels the equations that have led to the inventions and events that characterize the modern world, one of which -- Albert Einstein's famous energy equation, E=mc2 -- enabled the creation of the nuclear bomb. Also revealed are the mathematical foundations for the moon landing, airplane travel, the electric generator -- and even life itself. Praised by Publishers Weekly as "a wholly accessible, beautifully written exploration of the potent mathematical imagination," and named a Best Nonfiction Book of 1995, the stories behind The Five Equations That Changed the World, as told by Dr. Guillen, are not only chronicles of science, but also gripping dramas of jealousy, fame, war, and discovery. Dr. Michael Guillen is Instructor of Physics and Mathematics in the Core Curriculum Program at Harvard University.
When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought
Jim Holt - 2018
With his trademark clarity and humor, Holt probes the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the quest for the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of logic and truth. Along the way, he offers intimate biographical sketches of celebrated and neglected thinkers, from the physicist Emmy Noether to the computing pioneer Alan Turing and the discoverer of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot. Holt offers a painless and playful introduction to many of our most beautiful but least understood ideas, from Einsteinian relativity to string theory, and also invites us to consider why the greatest logician of the twentieth century believed the U.S. Constitution contained a terrible contradiction--and whether the universe truly has a future.
Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics
Nathan Yau - 2011
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could actually visualize data in such a way that we could maximize its potential and tell a story in a clear, concise manner? Thanks to the creative genius of Nathan Yau, we can. With this full-color book, data visualization guru and author Nathan Yau uses step-by-step tutorials to show you how to visualize and tell stories with data. He explains how to gather, parse, and format data and then design high quality graphics that help you explore and present patterns, outliers, and relationships.Presents a unique approach to visualizing and telling stories with data, from a data visualization expert and the creator of flowingdata.com, Nathan Yau Offers step-by-step tutorials and practical design tips for creating statistical graphics, geographical maps, and information design to find meaning in the numbers Details tools that can be used to visualize data-native graphics for the Web, such as ActionScript, Flash libraries, PHP, and JavaScript and tools to design graphics for print, such as R and Illustrator Contains numerous examples and descriptions of patterns and outliers and explains how to show them Visualize This demonstrates how to explain data visually so that you can present your information in a way that is easy to understand and appealing.
Dice World: Science and Life in a Random Universe
Brian Clegg - 2013
Admittedly real life wasn’t like that. But only, they argued, because we didn’t have enough data to be certain.Then the cracks began to appear. It proved impossible to predict exactly how three planets orbiting each other would move. Meteorologists discovered that the weather was truly chaotic – so dependent on small variations that it could never be predicted for more than a few days out. And the final nail in the coffin was quantum theory, showing that everything in the universe has probability at its heart.That gives human beings a problem. We understand the world through patterns. Randomness and probability will always be alien to us. But it’s time to plunge into this fascinating, shadowy world, because randomness crops up everywhere. Probability and statistics are the only way to get a grip on nature’s workings. They may even seal the fate of free will and predict how the universe will end.Forget Newton’s clockwork universe. Welcome to Dice World.
The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity
Pedro G. Ferreira - 2014
Their work has uncovered a number of the universe’s more surprising secrets, and many believe further wonders remain hidden within the theory’s tangle of equations, waiting to be exposed. In this sweeping narrative of science and culture, astrophysicist Pedro Ferreira brings general relativity to life through the story of the brilliant physicists, mathematicians, and astronomers who have taken up its challenge. For these scientists, the theory has been both a treasure trove and an enigma, fueling a century of intellectual struggle and triumph.. Einstein’s theory, which explains the relationships among gravity, space, and time, is possibly the most perfect intellectual achievement of modern physics, yet studying it has always been a controversial endeavor. Relativists were the target of persecution in Hitler’s Germany, hounded in Stalin’s Russia, and disdained in 1950s America. Even today, PhD students are warned that specializing in general relativity will make them unemployable. Despite these pitfalls, general relativity has flourished, delivering key insights into our understanding of the origin of time and the evolution of all the stars and galaxies in the cosmos. Its adherents have revealed what lies at the farthest reaches of the universe, shed light on the smallest scales of existence, and explained how the fabric of reality emerges. Dark matter, dark energy, black holes, and string theory are all progeny of Einstein’s theory. We are in the midst of a momentous transformation in modern physics. As scientists look farther and more clearly into space than ever before, The Perfect Theory reveals the greater relevance of general relativity, showing us where it started, where it has led, and where it can still take us.
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
Stewart Brand - 1994
How Buildings Learn is a masterful new synthesis that proposes that buildings adapt best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and that architects can mature from being artists of space to becoming artists of time. From the connected farmhouses of New England to I.M. Pei's Media Lab, from "satisficing" to "form follows funding," from the evolution of bungalows to the invention of Santa Fe Style, from Low Road military surplus buildings to a High Road English classic like Chatsworth—this is a far-ranging survey of unexplored essential territory.More than any other human artifacts, buildings improve with time—if they're allowed to. How Buildings Learn shows how to work with time rather than against it.
The Einstein Theory of Relativity
Hendrik Antoon Lorentz - 2004
The books published on the subject are so technical that only a person trained in pure physics and higher mathematics is able to fully understand them. In order to make a popular explanation of this far-reaching theory available, the present book is published.
The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics
Leonard Susskind - 2013
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.
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
M. Mitchell Waldrop - 1992
The science of complexity studies how single elements, such as a species or a stock, spontaneously organize into complicated structures like ecosystems and economies; stars become galaxies, and snowflakes avalanches almost as if these systems were obeying a hidden yearning for order. Drawing from diverse fields, scientific luminaries such as Nobel Laureates Murray Gell-Mann and Kenneth Arrow are studying complexity at a think tank called The Santa Fe Institute. The revolutionary new discoveries researchers have made there could change the face of every science from biology to cosmology to economics. M. Mitchell Waldrop's groundbreaking bestseller takes readers into the hearts and minds of these scientists to tell the story behind this scientific revolution as it unfolds.
Advanced Engineering Mathematics
K.A. Stroud - 2003
You proceed at your own rate and any difficulties you may encounter are resolved before you move on to the next topic. With a step-by-step programmed approach that is complemented by hundreds of worked examples and exercises, Advanced Engineering Mathematics is ideal as an on-the-job reference for professionals or as a self-study guide for students.Uses a unique technique-oriented approach that takes the reader through each topic step-by-step.Features a wealth of worked examples and progressively more challenging exercises.Contains Test Exercises, Learning Outcomes, Further Problems, and Can You? Checklists to guide and enhance learning and comprehension.Expanded coverage includes new chapters on Z Transforms, Fourier Transforms, Numerical Solutions of Partial Differential Equations, and more Complex Numbers.Includes a new chapter, Introduction to Invariant Linear Systems, and new material on difference equations integrated into the Z transforms chapter.
Gravitation
Charles W. Misner - 1973
These sections together make an appropriate one-term advanced/graduate level course (mathematical prerequisites: vector analysis and simple partial-differential equations). The book is printed to make it easy for readers to identify these sections.• The remaining Track 2 material provides a wealth of advanced topics instructors can draw from to flesh out a two-term course, with Track 1 sections serving as prerequisites.