How to Prove It: A Structured Approach


Daniel J. Velleman - 1994
    The book begins with the basic concepts of logic and set theory, to familiarize students with the language of mathematics and how it is interpreted. These concepts are used as the basis for a step-by-step breakdown of the most important techniques used in constructing proofs. To help students construct their own proofs, this new edition contains over 200 new exercises, selected solutions, and an introduction to Proof Designer software. No background beyond standard high school mathematics is assumed. Previous Edition Hb (1994) 0-521-44116-1 Previous Edition Pb (1994) 0-521-44663-5

Think Stats


Allen B. Downey - 2011
    This concise introduction shows you how to perform statistical analysis computationally, rather than mathematically, with programs written in Python.You'll work with a case study throughout the book to help you learn the entire data analysis process—from collecting data and generating statistics to identifying patterns and testing hypotheses. Along the way, you'll become familiar with distributions, the rules of probability, visualization, and many other tools and concepts.Develop your understanding of probability and statistics by writing and testing codeRun experiments to test statistical behavior, such as generating samples from several distributionsUse simulations to understand concepts that are hard to grasp mathematicallyLearn topics not usually covered in an introductory course, such as Bayesian estimationImport data from almost any source using Python, rather than be limited to data that has been cleaned and formatted for statistics toolsUse statistical inference to answer questions about real-world data

Elementary Statistics: Picturing the World


Ron Larson - 2002
    Offering an approach with a visual/graphical emphasis, this text offers a number of examples on the premise that students learn best by doing. This book features an emphasis on interpretation of results and critical thinking over calculations.

Mathematics and the Imagination


Edward Kasner - 1940
    But your pleasure and prowess at games, gambling, and other numerically related pursuits can be heightened with this entertaining volume, in which the authors offer a fascinating view of some of the lesser-known and more imaginative aspects of mathematics.A brief and breezy explanation of the new language of mathematics precedes a smorgasbord of such thought-provoking subjects as the googolplex (the largest definite number anyone has yet bothered to conceive of); assorted geometries — plane and fancy; famous puzzles that made mathematical history; and tantalizing paradoxes. Gamblers receive fair warning on the laws of chance; a look at rubber-sheet geometry twists circles into loops without sacrificing certain important properties; and an exploration of the mathematics of change and growth shows how calculus, among its other uses, helps trace the path of falling bombs.Written with wit and clarity for the intelligent reader who has taken high school and perhaps college math, this volume deftly progresses from simple arithmetic to calculus and non-Euclidean geometry. It “lives up to its title in every way [and] might well have been merely terrifying, whereas it proves to be both charming and exciting." — Saturday Review of Literature.

Trivium: The Classical Liberal Arts of Grammar, Logic, & Rhetoric


John Michell - 2016
    Following on the success of Quadrivium and Sciencia, Trivium gathers six Wooden Books titles together into a beautiful six-color package that presents ancient wisdom in an accessible way. Trivium includes the books Euphonics, Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric,, Poetic Meter and Form, and Ethics.

The Möbius Strip: Dr. August Möbius's Marvelous Band in Mathematics, Games, Literature, Art, Technology, and Cosmology


Clifford A. Pickover - 2007
    Escher -- goes to some of the strangest spots imaginable. It takes us to a place where the purely intellectual enters our daily world: where our outraged senses, overloaded with grocery bills, the price of gas, and what to eat for lunch, are expected to absorb really bizarre ideas. And no better guide to this weird universe exists than the brilliant thinker Clifford A. Pickover, the 21st century's answer to Buckminster Fuller. Come along as Pickover traces the origins of the Mobius strip from the mid-1800s, when the visionary scientist Dr. August Mobius became the first to describe the properties of one-sided surfaces, to the present, where it is an integral part of mathematics, magic, science, art, engineering, literature, and music. It has become a metaphor for change, strangeness, looping, and rejuvenation. Touching on everything from molecules and metal sculptures to postage stamps, architectural structures, and models of our entire universe, The Mobius Strip is lavishly illustrated and gives readers a glimpse into other worlds and new ways of thinking as Pickover reaches across cultures and dimensions.

The Joy of Mathematics: Discovering Mathematics All Around You


Theoni Pappas - 1986
    Written by the well-known mathematics teacher consultant, this volume's collection of over 200 clearly illustrated mathematical ideas, concepts, puzzles, and games shows where they turn up in the real world. You'll find out what a googol is, visit hotel infinity, read a thorny logic problem that was stumping them back in the 8th century.THE JOY OF MATHEMATICS is designed to be opened at random...it's mini essays are self-contained providing the reader with an enjoyable way to explore and experience mathematics at its best.

King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry


Siobhan Roberts - 2006
    Yet geometry is so much more than shapes and numbers; indeed, it governs much of our lives—from architecture and microchips to car design, animated movies, the molecules of food, even our own body chemistry. And as Siobhan Roberts elegantly conveys in The King of Infinite Space, there can be no better guide to the majesty of geometry than Donald Coxeter, perhaps the greatest geometer of the twentieth century.Many of the greatest names in intellectual history—Pythagoras, Plato, Archimedes, Euclid— were geometers, and their creativity and achievements illuminate those of Coxeter, revealing geometry to be a living, ever-evolving endeavor, an intellectual adventure that has always been a building block of civilization. Coxeter's special contributions—his famed Coxeter groups and Coxeter diagrams—have been called by other mathematicians "tools as essential as numbers themselves," but his greatest achievement was to almost single-handedly preserve the tradition of classical geometry when it was under attack in a mathematical era that valued all things austere and rational.Coxeter also inspired many outside the field of mathematics. Artist M. C. Escher credited Coxeter with triggering his legendary Circle Limit patterns, while futurist/inventor Buckminster Fuller acknowledged that his famed geodesic dome owed much to Coxeter's vision. The King of Infinite Space is an elegant portal into the fascinating, arcane world of geometry.

Introduction to Linear Algebra


Gilbert Strang - 1993
    Topics covered include matrix multiplication, row reduction, matrix inverse, orthogonality and computation. The self-teaching book is loaded with examples and graphics and provides a wide array of probing problems, accompanying solutions, and a glossary. Chapter 1: Introduction to Vectors; Chapter 2: Solving Linear Equations; Chapter 3: Vector Spaces and Subspaces; Chapter 4: Orthogonality; Chapter 5: Determinants; Chapter 6: Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors; Chapter 7: Linear Transformations; Chapter 8: Applications; Chapter 9: Numerical Linear Algebra; Chapter 10: Complex Vectors and Matrices; Solutions to Selected Exercises; Final Exam. Matrix Factorizations. Conceptual Questions for Review. Glossary: A Dictionary for Linear Algebra Index Teaching Codes Linear Algebra in a Nutshell.

Naming and Necessity


Saul A. Kripke - 1980
    It redirected philosophical attention to neglected questions of natural and metaphysical necessity and to the connections between these and theories of reference, in particular of naming, and of identity. From a critique of the dominant tendency to assimilate names to descriptions and more generally to treat their reference as a function of their Fregean sense, surprisingly deep and widespread consequences may be drawn. The largely discredited distinction between accidental and essential properties, both of individual things (including people) and of kinds of things, is revived. So is a consequent view of science as what seeks out the essences of natural kinds. Traditional objections to such views are dealt with by sharpening distinctions between epistemic and metaphysical necessity; in particular by the startling admission of necessary a posteriori truths. From these, in particular from identity statements using rigid designators whether of things or of kinds, further remarkable consequences are drawn for the natures of things, of people, and of kinds; strong objections follow, for example to identity versions of materialism as a theory of the mind.This seminal work, to which today's thriving essentialist metaphysics largely owes its impetus, is here published with a substantial new Preface by the author.

Adding a Dimension: Seventeen Essays on the History of Science


Isaac Asimov - 1964
    Asimov takes the reader on a rousing mental trip into the world of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy.

The Fabulous Fibonacci Numbers


Alfred S. Posamentier - 2007
    In this simple pattern beginning with two ones, each succeeding number is the sum of the two numbers immediately preceding it (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ad infinitum). Far from being just a curiosity, this sequence recurs in structures found throughout nature - from the arrangement of whorls on a pinecone to the branches of certain plant stems. All of which is astounding evidence for the deep mathematical basis of the natural world. With admirable clarity, two veteran math educators take us on a fascinating tour of the many ramifications of the Fibonacci numbers. They begin with a brief history of a distinguished Italian discoverer, who, among other accomplishments, was responsible for popularizing the use of Arabic numerals in the West. Turning to botany, the authors demonstrate, through illustrative diagrams, the unbelievable connections between Fibonacci numbers and natural forms (pineapples, sunflowers, and daisies are just a few examples). In art, architecture, the stock market, and other areas of society and culture, they point out numerous examples of the Fibonacci sequence as well as its derivative, the "golden ratio." And of course in mathematics, as the authors amply demonstrate, there are almost boundless applications in probability, number theory, geometry, algebra, and Pascal's triangle, to name a few.Accessible and appealing to even the most math-phobic individual, this fun and enlightening book allows the reader to appreciate the elegance of mathematics and its amazing applications in both natural and cultural settings.

The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza & the Fate of God in the Modern World


Matthew Stewart - 2005
    a personal confession of its creator and a kind of involuntary and unperceived memoir.". Stewart affirms this maxim in his colorful reinterpretation of the lives and works of 17th-century philosophers Spinoza and Leibniz. In November 1676, the foppish courtier Leibniz, "the ultimate insider... an orthodox Lutheran from conservative Germany," journeyed to The Hague to visit the self-sufficient, freethinking Spinoza, "a double exile... an apostate Jew from licentious Holland." A prodigious polymath, Leibniz understood Spinoza's insight that "science was in the process of rendering the God of revelation obsolete; that it had already undermined the special place of the human individual in nature." Spinoza embraced this new world. Seeing the orthodox God as a "prop for theocratic tyranny," he articulated the basic theory for the modern secular state. Leibniz, on the other hand, spent the rest of his life championing God and theocracy like a defense lawyer defending a client he knows is guilty. He elaborated a metaphysics that was, at bottom, a reaction to Spinoza and collapses into Spinozism, as Stewart deftly shows. For Stewart, Leibniz's reaction to Spinoza and modernity set the tone for "the dominant form of modern philosophy"—a category that includes Kant, Hegel, Bergson, Heidegger and "the whole 'postmodern' project of deconstructing the phallogocentric tradition of western thought." Readers of philosophy may find much to disagree with in these arguments, but Stewart's wit and profluent prose make this book a fascinating read.

The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel


William Goldbloom Bloch - 2008
    Now, in The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel, William Goldbloom Bloch takes readers on a fascinating tour of the mathematical ideas hiddenwithin one of the classic works of modern literature.Written in the vein of Douglas R. Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning G�del, Escher, Bach, this original and imaginative book sheds light on one of Borges' most complex, richly layered works. Bloch begins each chapter with a mathematical idea--combinatorics, topology, geometry, informationtheory--followed by examples and illustrations that put flesh on the theoretical bones. In this way, he provides many fascinating insights into Borges' Library. He explains, for instance, a straightforward way to calculate how many books are in the Library--an easily notated but literallyunimaginable number--and also shows that, if each book were the size of a grain of sand, the entire universe could only hold a fraction of the books in the Library. Indeed, if each book were the size of a proton, our universe would still not be big enough to hold anywhere near all the books.Given Borges' well-known affection for mathematics, this exploration of the story through the eyes of a humanistic mathematician makes a unique and important contribution to the body of Borgesian criticism. Bloch not only illuminates one of the great short stories of modern literature but alsoexposes the reader--including those more inclined to the literary world--to many intriguing and entrancing mathematical ideas.

Statistics for Management


Richard I. Levin - 1978
    Like its predecessors, the seventh edition includes the absolute minimum of mathematical/statistical notation necessary to teach the material. Concepts are fully explained in simple, easy-to-understand language as they are presented, making the book an excellent source from which to learn and teach. After each discussion, readers are guided through real-world examples to show how book principles work in professional practice. Includes easy-to-understand explanations of difficult statistical topics, such as sampling distributions, relationship between confidence level and confidence interval, interpreting r-square. A complete package of teaching/learning aids is provided in every chapter, including chapter review exercises, chapter concepts tests,"Statistics at Work" conceptual cases, "Computer Database Exercises," "From the Textbook to the Real-World Examples." This ISBN is in two volumes Part A and Part B.