Book picks similar to
Realism, Mathematics, And Modality by Hartry Field
philosophy-of-math
mathematics
metaphysics
philosophy
Student Solutions Manual, Vol. 1 for Swokowski's Calculus: The Classic Edition
Earl W. Swokowski - 1991
Prepare for exams and succeed in your mathematics course with this comprehensive solutions manual! Featuring worked out-solutions to the problems in CALCULUS: THE CLASSIC EDITION, 5th Edition, this manual shows you how to approach and solve problems using the same step-by-step explanations found in your textbook examples.
A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science
Michael S. Schneider - 1994
This is a new view of mathematics, not the one we learned at school but a comprehensive guide to the patterns that recur through the universe and underlie human affairs. A Beginner's Guide to Constructing, the Universe shows you: Why cans, pizza, and manhole covers are round.Why one and two weren't considered numbers by the ancient Greeks.Why squares show up so often in goddess art and board games.What property makes the spiral the most widespread shape in nature, from embryos and hair curls to hurricanes and galaxies. How the human body shares the design of a bean plant and the solar system. How a snowflake is like Stonehenge, and a beehive like a calendar. How our ten fingers hold the secrets of both a lobster a cathedral, and much more.
The New York Times Book of Mathematics: More Than 100 Years of Writing by the Numbers
Gina Kolata - 2013
Big and informative, "The New York Times Book of Mathematics" gathers more than 110 articles written from 1892 to 2010 that cover statistics, coincidences, chaos theory, famous problems, cryptography, computers, and many other topics. Edited by Pulitzer Prize finalist and senior "Times" writer Gina Kolata, and featuring renowned contributors such as James Gleick, William L. Laurence, Malcolm W. Browne, George Johnson, and John Markoff, it's a must-have for any math and science enthusiast!
Godel: A Life Of Logic, The Mind, And Mathematics
John L. Casti - 2000
His Incompleteness Theorem turned not only mathematics but also the whole world of science and philosophy on its head. Equally legendary were Gö's eccentricities, his close friendship with Albert Einstein, and his paranoid fear of germs that eventually led to his death from self-starvation. Now, in the first popular biography of this strange and brilliant thinker, John Casti and Werner DePauli bring the legend to life. After describing his childhood in the Moravian capital of Brno, the authors trace the arc of Gö's remarkable career, from the famed Vienna Circle, where philosophers and scientists debated notions of truth, to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived and worked until his death in 1978. In the process, they shed light on Gö's contributions to mathematics, philosophy, computer science, artificial intelligence -- even cosmology -- in an entertaining and accessible way.
No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman
Richard P. Feynman - 1965
He was hugely irreverent and always completely honest—with himself, with his colleagues, and with nature.No Ordinary Genius traces Feynman's remarkable adventures inside and outside science, in words and more than one-hundred photographs, many of them supplied by his family and close friends. The words are often his own and those of family, friends, and colleagues such as his sister, Joan Feynman; his children, Carl and Michelle; Freeman Dyson; Hans Bethe; Daniel Hillis; Marvin Minsky; and John Archibald Wheeler. The book gives vivid insight into the mind of a great creative scientist at work and at play, and it challenges the popular myth of the scientist as a cold reductionist dedicated to stripping romance and mystery from the natural world. Feynman's wonderfully infectious enthusiasm shines through in his photographs and in his tales.
The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation that Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe
William Poundstone - 2019
It languished in obscurity for centuries until computers came along and made it easy to crunch the numbers. Now, as the foundation of big data, Bayes' formula has become a linchpin of the digital economy.But here's where things get really interesting: Bayes' theorem can also be used to lay odds on the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence; on whether we live in a Matrix-like counterfeit of reality; on the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum theory being correct; and on the biggest question of all: how long will humanity survive?The Doomsday Calculation tells how Silicon Valley's profitable formula became a controversial pivot of contemporary thought. Drawing on interviews with thought leaders around the globe, it's the story of a group of intellectual mavericks who are challenging what we thought we knew about our place in the universe. The Doomsday Calculation is compelling reading for anyone interested in our culture and its future.
Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
Peter L. Bernstein - 1996
Peter Bernstein has written a comprehensive history of man's efforts to understand risk and probability, beginning with early gamblers in ancient Greece, continuing through the 17th-century French mathematicians Pascal and Fermat and up to modern chaos theory. Along the way he demonstrates that understanding risk underlies everything from game theory to bridge-building to winemaking.
Lauren Ipsum
Carlos Bueno - 2011
If the idea of a computer science book without computers upsets you, please close your eyes until you’ve finished reading the rest of this page.The truth is that computer science is not really about the computer. It is just a tool to help you see ideas more clearly. You can see the moon and stars without a telescope, smell the flowers without a fluoroscope, have fun without a funoscope, and be silly sans oscilloscope.You can also play with computer science without... you-know-what. Ideas are the real stuff of computer science. This book is about those ideas, and how to find them.
Quadrivium: The Four Classical Liberal Arts of Number, Geometry, Music, & Cosmology
John Martineau - 2010
It was studied from antiquity to the Renaissance as a way of glimpsing the nature of reality. Geometry is number in space; music is number in time; and comology expresses number in space and time. Number, music, and geometry are metaphysical truths: life across the universe investigates them; they foreshadow the physical sciences.Quadrivium is the first volume to bring together these four subjects in many hundreds of years. Composed of six successful titles in the Wooden Books series-Sacred Geometry, Sacred Number, Harmonograph, The Elements of Music, Platonic & Archimedean Solids, and A Little Book of Coincidence-it makes ancient wisdom and its astonishing interconnectedness accessible to us today.Beautifully produced in six different colors of ink, Quadrivium will appeal to anyone interested in mathematics, music, astronomy, and how the universe works.
The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays
Hilary Putnam - 2002
In this book, one of the world's preeminent philosophers takes issue with an idea that has found an all-too-prominent place in popular culture and philosophical thought: the idea that while factual claims can be rationally established or refuted, claims about value are wholly subjective, not capable of being rationally argued for or against. Although it is on occasion important and useful to distinguish between factual claims and value judgments, the distinction becomes, Hilary Putnam argues, positively harmful when identified with a dichotomy between the objective and the purely subjective.Putnam explores the arguments that led so much of the analytic philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology to become openly hostile to the idea that talk of value and human flourishing can be right or wrong, rational or irrational; and by which, following philosophy, social sciences such as economics have fallen victim to the bankrupt metaphysics of Logical Positivism. Tracing the problem back to Hume's conception of a matter of fact as well as to Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments, Putnam identifies a path forward in the work of Amartya Sen. Lively, concise, and wise, his book prepares the way for a renewed mutual fruition of philosophy and the social sciences.
xkcd: volume 0
Randall Munroe - 2009
While it's practically required reading in the geek community, xkcd fans are as varied as the comic's subject matter. This book creates laughs from science jokes on one page to relationship humor on another.xkcd: volume 0 is the first book from the immensely popular webcomic with a passionate readership (just Google "xkcd meetup").The artist selected personal and fan favorites from his first 600 comics. It was lovingly assembled from high-resolution original scans of the comics (the mouseover text is discreetly included), and features a lot of doodles, notes, and puzzles in the margins.The book is published by Breadpig, which donates all of the publisher profits from this book to Room to Read for promoting literacy in the developing world.
New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy
Robert J. Spitzer - 2010
New Proofs for the Existence of God responds to these glaring omissions. From universal space-time asymmetry to cosmic coincidences to the intelligibility of reality, Robert Spitzer tackles a wealth of evidence. He considers string theory, quantum cosmology, mathematical thoughts on infinity, and much more. This fascinating and stunning collection of evidence provides solid grounding for reasonable and responsible belief in a super-intelligent, transcendent, creative power standing at the origins of our universe.
Good Math: A Geek's Guide to the Beauty of Numbers, Logic, and Computation
Mark C. Chu-Carroll - 2013
There is joy and beauty in mathematics, and in more than two dozen essays drawn from his popular “Good Math” blog, you’ll find concepts, proofs, and examples that are often surprising, counterintuitive, or just plain weird.Mark begins his journey with the basics of numbers, with an entertaining trip through the integers and the natural, rational, irrational, and transcendental numbers. The voyage continues with a look at some of the oddest numbers in mathematics, including zero, the golden ratio, imaginary numbers, Roman numerals, and Egyptian and continuing fractions. After a deep dive into modern logic, including an introduction to linear logic and the logic-savvy Prolog language, the trip concludes with a tour of modern set theory and the advances and paradoxes of modern mechanical computing.If your high school or college math courses left you grasping for the inner meaning behind the numbers, Mark’s book will both entertain and enlighten you.
A Mathematician's Apology
G.H. Hardy - 1940
H. Hardy was one of this century's finest mathematical thinkers, renowned among his contemporaries as a 'real mathematician ... the purest of the pure'. He was also, as C. P. Snow recounts in his Foreword, 'unorthodox, eccentric, radical, ready to talk about anything'. This 'apology', written in 1940 as his mathematical powers were declining, offers a brilliant and engaging account of mathematics as very much more than a science; when it was first published, Graham Greene hailed it alongside Henry James's notebooks as 'the best account of what it was like to be a creative artist'. C. P. Snow's Foreword gives sympathetic and witty insights into Hardy's life, with its rich store of anecdotes concerning his collaboration with the brilliant Indian mathematician Ramanujan, his aphorisms and idiosyncrasies, and his passion for cricket. This is a unique account of the fascination of mathematics and of one of its most compelling exponents in modern times.
A Beautiful Math: John Nash, Game Theory, and the Modern Quest for a Code of Nature
Tom Siegfried - 2006
Today Nash's beautiful math has become a universal language for research in the social sciences and has infiltrated the realms of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and even quantum physics. John Nash won the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics for pioneering research published in the 1950s on a new branch of mathematics known as game theory. At the time of Nash's early work, game theory was briefly popular among some mathematicians and Cold War analysts. But it remained obscure until the 1970s when evolutionary biologists began applying it to their work. In the 1980s economists began to embrace game theory. Since then it has found an ever expanding repertoire of applications among a wide range of scientific disciplines. Today neuroscientists peer into game players' brains, anthropologists play games with people from primitive cultures, biologists use games to explain the evolution of human language, and mathematicians exploit games to better understand social networks. A common thread connecting much of this research is its relevance to the ancient quest for a science of human social behavior, or a Code of Nature, in the spirit of the fictional science of psychohistory described in the famous Foundation novels by the late Isaac Asimov. In A Beautiful Math, acclaimed science writer Tom Siegfried describes how game theory links the life sciences, social sciences, and physical sciences in a way that may bring Asimov's dream closer to reality.