A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines


Janna Levin - 2006
    “They are both brilliantly original and outsiders,” the narrator tells us. “They are both besotted with mathematics. But for all their devotion, mathematics is indifferent, unaltered by any of their dramas . . . Against indifference, I want to tell their stories.” Which she does in a haunting, incantatory voice, the two lives unfolding in parallel narratives that overlap in the magnitude of each man’s achievement and demise: Gödel, delusional and paranoid, would starve himself to death; Turing, arrested for homosexual activities, would be driven to suicide. And they meet as well in the narrator’s mind, where facts are interwoven with her desire and determination to find meaning in the maze of their stories: two men devoted to truth of the highest abstract nature, yet unable to grasp the mundane truths of their own lives.A unique amalgam of luminous imagination and richly evoked historic character and event—A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines is a story about the pursuit of truth and its effect on the lives of two men. A story of genius and madness, incredible yet true.

String, Straightedge, and Shadow: The Story of Geometry


Julia E. Diggins - 1965
    Julia Diggins masterfully recreates the atmosphere of ancient times, when men, using three simple tools, the string, the straightedge, and the shadow, discovered the basic principles and constructions of elementary geometry. Her book reveals how these discoveries related to the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece.The fabric of the story is woven out of archeological and historical records and legends about the major men of mathematics. By reconstructing the events as they might have happened, Diggins enables the attentive reader to easily follow the pattern of reasoning that leads to an ingenious proof of the Pythagorean theorem, an appreciation of the significance of the Golden Mean in art and architecture, and the construction of the five regular solids.Out of print for 34 years, Julia Diggins' classic book is back and is a must-read for middle school students or for parents helping their children through their first geometry course. You will be fascinated with the graphic illustrations and written depiction of how the knowledge and wisdom of so many cultures helped shape our civilization today. This book is popular with teachers and parents who use Jamie York's Making Math Meaningful curriculum books.

Abstract Algebra


I.N. Herstein - 1986
    Providing a concise introduction to abstract algebra, this work unfolds some of the fundamental systems with the aim of reaching applicable, significant results.

Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity


Mark A. Noll - 1997
    Evangelicalism\u2019s premier historian provides a general introduction to church history.

Q.E.D.: Beauty in Mathematical Proof


Burkard Polster - 2004
    presents some of the most famous mathematical proofs in a charming book that will appeal to nonmathematicians and math experts alike. Grasp in an instant why Pythagoras's theorem must be correct. Follow the ancient Chinese proof of the volume formula for the frustrating frustum, and Archimedes' method for finding the volume of a sphere. Discover the secrets of pi and why, contrary to popular belief, squaring the circle really is possible. Study the subtle art of mathematical domino tumbling, and find out how slicing cones helped save a city and put a man on the moon.

Principles of Environmental Science: Inquiry and Applications


William P. Cunningham - 2001
    This book is intended for use in a one- or two-semester course in environmental science, human ecology, or environmental studies at the college or advanced placement high school level.

How to Think Like a Mathematician


Kevin Houston - 2009
    Working through the book you will develop an arsenal of techniques to help you unlock the meaning of definitions, theorems and proofs, solve problems, and write mathematics effectively. All the major methods of proof - direct method, cases, induction, contradiction and contrapositive - are featured. Concrete examples are used throughout, and you'll get plenty of practice on topics common to many courses such as divisors, Euclidean algorithms, modular arithmetic, equivalence relations, and injectivity and surjectivity of functions. The material has been tested by real students over many years so all the essentials are covered. With over 300 exercises to help you test your progress, you'll soon learn how to think like a mathematician.

The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events


Bernard Grun - 1946
    Provides a chronology of seven thousand years of significant moments in history, religion, science, and the arts in an accessible format designed for quick reference.

Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality


Edward Frenkel - 2013
    In this heartfelt and passionate book, Frenkel shows that mathematics, far from occupying a specialist niche, goes to the heart of all matter, uniting us across cultures, time, and space.Love and Math tells two intertwined stories: of the wonders of mathematics and of one young man’s journey learning and living it. Having braved a discriminatory educational system to become one of the twenty-first century’s leading mathematicians, Frenkel now works on one of the biggest ideas to come out of math in the last 50 years: the Langlands Program. Considered by many to be a Grand Unified Theory of mathematics, the Langlands Program enables researchers to translate findings from one field to another so that they can solve problems, such as Fermat’s last theorem, that had seemed intractable before.At its core, Love and Math is a story about accessing a new way of thinking, which can enrich our lives and empower us to better understand the world and our place in it. It is an invitation to discover the magic hidden universe of mathematics.

Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World, Volume Two: From 1000 CE to the Present


Robert L. Tignor - 2002
    Worlds Together, Worlds Apart is organized around major world history stories and themes: the emergence of cities, the building of the Silk Road, the spread of major religions, the spread of the Black Death, the Age of Exploration, alternatives to 19th-century capitalism, the rise of modern nation-states and empires, and more. In the Third Edition, the text has been compressed and streamlined to heighten emphasis on world history stories and themes throughout.

Elements of Electromagnetics


Matthew N.O. Sadiku - 1993
    The book also provides a balanced presentation of time-varying and static fields, preparingstudents for employment in today's industrial and manufacturing sectors. Streamlined to facilitate student understanding, this edition features worked examples in every chapter that explain how to use the theory presented in the text to solve different kinds of problems. Numerical methods, including MATLAB and vector analysis, are also included to help students analyzesituations that they are likely to encounter in industry practice. Elements of Electromagnetics, Fifth Edition, is designed for introductory undergraduate courses in electromagnetics.

A Concise History of Mathematics


Dirk Jan Struik - 1948
    Students, researchers, historians, specialists — in short, everyone with an interest in mathematics — will find it engrossing and stimulating.Beginning with the ancient Near East, the author traces the ideas and techniques developed in Egypt, Babylonia, China, and Arabia, looking into such manuscripts as the Egyptian Papyrus Rhind, the Ten Classics of China, and the Siddhantas of India. He considers Greek and Roman developments from their beginnings in Ionian rationalism to the fall of Constantinople; covers medieval European ideas and Renaissance trends; analyzes 17th- and 18th-century contributions; and offers an illuminating exposition of 19th century concepts. Every important figure in mathematical history is dealt with — Euclid, Archimedes, Diophantus, Omar Khayyam, Boethius, Fermat, Pascal, Newton, Leibniz, Fourier, Gauss, Riemann, Cantor, and many others.For this latest edition, Dr. Struik has both revised and updated the existing text, and also added a new chapter on the mathematics of the first half of the 20th century. Concise coverage is given to set theory, the influence of relativity and quantum theory, tensor calculus, the Lebesgue integral, the calculus of variations, and other important ideas and concepts. The book concludes with the beginnings of the computer era and the seminal work of von Neumann, Turing, Wiener, and others."The author's ability as a first-class historian as well as an able mathematician has enabled him to produce a work which is unquestionably one of the best." — Nature Magazine.

A Course of Pure Mathematics


G.H. Hardy - 1908
    Since its publication in 1908, it has been a classic work to which successive generations of budding mathematicians have turned at the beginning of their undergraduate courses. In its pages, Hardy combines the enthusiasm of a missionary with the rigor of a purist in his exposition of the fundamental ideas of the differential and integral calculus, of the properties of infinite series and of other topics involving the notion of limit.

Human Anatomy


Michael McKinley - 2005
    This book contains student-friendly Study Tips, Clinical View boxes, and progressive question sets to motivate students to internalize and apply what they've learned.

Calculus On Manifolds: A Modern Approach To Classical Theorems Of Advanced Calculus


Michael Spivak - 1965
    The approach taken here uses elementary versions of modern methods found in sophisticated mathematics. The formal prerequisites include only a term of linear algebra, a nodding acquaintance with the notation of set theory, and a respectable first-year calculus course (one which at least mentions the least upper bound (sup) and greatest lower bound (inf) of a set of real numbers). Beyond this a certain (perhaps latent) rapport with abstract mathematics will be found almost essential.