Mathematical Circles: Russian Experience (Mathematical World, Vol. 7)


Dmitri Fomin - 1996
    The work is predicated on the idea that studying mathematics can generate the same enthusiasm as playing a team sport - without necessarily being competitive.

100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know


John D. Barrow - 2008
    This hugely informative and wonderfully entertaining little book answers one hundred essential questions about existence. It unravels the knotty, clarifies the conundrums and sheds light into dark corners. From winning the lottery, placing bets at the races and escaping from bears to sports, Shakespeare, Google, game theory, drunks, divorce settlements and dodgy accounting; from chaos to infinity and everything in between, 100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know has all the answers!

50 Mathematical Ideas You Really Need to Know


Tony Crilly - 2007
    Who invented zero? Why are there 60 seconds in a minute? Can a butterfly's wings really cause a storm on the far side of the world? In 50 concise essays, Professor Tony Crilly explains the mathematical concepts that allow use to understand and shape the world around us.

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.

PopCo


Scarlett Thomas - 2004
    She works for the huge toy company named PopCo, where she creates snooping kids' kits - KidSpy, KidTec and KidCracker. At the company conference Alice and her colleagues are brought into developing the ultimate product for the teenage girls.

The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking


Russell A. Carleton - 2018
    It's a thinking game. It's also a shifting game. Nowhere is this more evident than in the statistical revolution which has swept through the pastime in recent years, bringing metrics like WAR, OPS, and BABIP into front offices and living rooms alike. So what's on the horizon for a game that is constantly evolving? Positioned at the crossroads of sabermetrics and cognitive science, The Shift alters the trajectory of both traditional and analytics-based baseball thought. With a background in clinical psychology as well as experience in major league front offices, Baseball Prospectus' Russell Carleton illuminates advanced statistics and challenges cultural assumptions, demonstrating along the way that data and logic need not be at odds with the human elements of baseball—in fact, they're inextricably intertwined. Covering topics ranging from infield shifts to paradigm shifts, Carleton writes with verve, honesty, and an engaging style, inviting all those who love the game to examine it deeply and maybe a little differently. Data becomes digestible; intangibles are rendered not only accessible, but quantifiable. Casual fans and statheads alike will not want to miss this compelling meditation on what makes baseball tick.

An Invisible Sign of My Own


Aimee Bender - 2000
    Now, in her first novel, she builds on that early promise.Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can’t stop doing is math: She knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. When Mona begins teaching math to second-graders, she finds a ready audience. But the difficult and wonderful facts of life keep intruding. She finds herself drawn to the new science teacher, who has an unnerving way of seeing through her intricately built façade. Bender brilliantly directs her characters, giving them unexpected emotional depth and setting them in a calamitous world, both fancifully surreal and startlingly familiar.

Hidden Figures


Margot Lee Shetterly - 2016
    Set amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program. Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as ‘Human Computers’, calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts, these ‘coloured computers’ used pencil and paper to write the equations that would launch rockets and astronauts, into space. Moving from World War II through NASA’s golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War and the women’s rights movement, ‘Hidden Figures’ interweaves a rich history of mankind’s greatest adventure with the intimate stories of five courageous women whose work forever changed the world.

Gametek: The Math and Science of Gaming


Geoffrey Engelstein - 2018
    Connecting games to math, science, and psychology, GameTek has grown to be one of the most popular parts of the show.This volume commemorates the anniversary with a collection of over seventy of the best segments, many with annotations and illustrations.With chapters on everything from Rock, Paper, Scissors to the Prisoner’s Dilemma to Player Engagement to Quasicrystals to Buddha’s Forbidden Games, GameTek is sure to delight not just game designers and players, but anyone who wants to learn about the world from a new perspective.Sections:• Game Theory• Math• Psychology• Science• Game Mechanics• Psychology Games• HistoryFrom the first time I heard it, the GameTek segment in The Dice Tower podcast became my favorite part of the show. Listening to Geoff is like going to your favorite lesson with your favorite teacher. He teaches about games (yay!) and does it in a very interesting way with lots of examples. He does amazing stuff. He knows about the construction of games, he knows the theory, he knows all that stuff behind the scenes that we gamers do not see when just playing a game and having fun.Ignacy Trzewiczek, Portal GamesThere are many hobby game 'experts' out there, dying to give you their opinion on how the industry works, how games work, what types of games are best, and so on. Geoff Engelstein is the expert that requires your attention. He is a scholar of games, and his research on games and other principles that apply to gaming is matched by none.Stephen Buonocore, Stronghold GamesOver the years, I’ve listened to a lot of people talk about board games, yet the short snippets that Geoff puts out are the ones that I find myself thinking about in the quiet of the night. His are the segments that you laugh at and say, “I have NO idea what you are talking about” — but later on use to show people just how intellectual you are.Tom Vasel, The Dice Tower

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy


Sharon Bertsch McGrayne - 2011
    To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok.In the first-ever account of Bayes' rule for general readers, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it. She traces its discovery by an amateur mathematician in the 1740s through its development into roughly its modern form by French scientist Pierre Simon Laplace. She reveals why respected statisticians rendered it professionally taboo for 150 years—at the same time that practitioners relied on it to solve crises involving great uncertainty and scanty information (Alan Turing's role in breaking Germany's Enigma code during World War II), and explains how the advent of off-the-shelf computer technology in the 1980s proved to be a game-changer. Today, Bayes' rule is used everywhere from DNA de-coding to Homeland Security.Drawing on primary source material and interviews with statisticians and other scientists, The Theory That Would Not Die is the riveting account of how a seemingly simple theorem ignited one of the greatest controversies of all time.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Statistics


Robert A. Donnelly Jr. - 2004
    Readerswill find information on frequency distributions; mean, median, and mode; range, variance, and standard deviation;probability; and more.-Emphasizes Microsoft Excel for number-crunching and computationsDownload a sample chapter.

Hilbert


Constance Bowman Reid - 1970
    These noteworthy accounts of the lives of David Hilbert and Richard Courant are closely related: Courant's story is, in many ways, seen as the sequel to the story of Hilbert. Originally published to great acclaim, both books explore the dramatic scientific history expressed in the lives of these two great scientists and described in the lively, nontechnical writing style of Contance Reid.

Children's Mathematics: Cognitively Guided Instruction


Thomas P. Carpenter - 1999
    Too often, however, the mathematics instruction that we impose upon them in the classroom fails to connect with this informal knowledge. Children's Mathematics was written to help you understand children's intuitive mathematical thinking and use that knowledge to help children learn mathematics with understanding. Based on more than twenty years of research, this book portrays the development of children's understanding of basic number concepts. The authors offer a detailed explanation and numerous examples of the problem-solving and computational processes that virtually all children use as their numerical thinking develops. They also describe how classrooms can be organized to foster that development. Two accompanying CDs provide a remarkable inside look at students and teachers in real classrooms implementing the teaching and learning strategies described in the text. Together, the book and CDs provide you with the foundation necessary to engage children in discussions of how they think through problems-providing suggestions for what problems to give and insight into what responses to expect, and how children's thinking will evolve.