It describes how the laws and discoveries of information theory now support controversial revisions to Darwinian evolution, begin to unravel the mysteries of language, memory and dreams, and stimulate provocative ideas in psychology, philosophy, art, music, computers and even the structure of society. Perhaps its most fascinating and unexpected surprise is the suggestion the order and complexity may be as natural as disorder and disorganization. Contrary to the entropy principle, which implies that order is the exception and confusion the rule, information theory asserts that order and sense can indeed prevail against disorder and nonsense. From the simplest forms of organic life to the words used to express our most complex ideas, from our genes to our dreams, from microcomputers to telecommunications, virtually everything around us follows simple rules of information. Life and the material world, like language, remain "grammatical." Grammatical man inhabits a grammatical universe.

    And, it's true, many of them do. But Paul Erdos never followed the usual path. At the age of four, he could ask you when you were born and then calculate the number of seconds you had been alive in his head. But he didn't learn to butter his own bread until he turned twenty. Instead, he traveled around the world, from one mathematician to the next, collaborating on an astonishing number of publications. With a simple, lyrical text and richly layered illustrations, this is a beautiful introduction to the world of math and a fascinating look at the unique character traits that made "Uncle Paul" a great man.

    But now, acclaimed linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence language —and vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our language has a word for "blue"?Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all these questions is—yes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why Russian water —a "she"— becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her, demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial.

    It covers areas such as fundamentals, logic, counting, relations and digraphs, trees, topics in graph theory, languages and finite-state machines, and groups and coding.

    In these cautionary tales of greedy gamblers, reckless businessmen, and ruthless con men, Sherlock Holmes uses his deep understanding of probability, statistics, decision theory, and game theory to solve crimes and protect the innocent. But it's not just the characters in these well-crafted stories that are deceived by statistics or fall prey to gambling fallacies. We all suffer from the results of poor decisions. In this illuminating collection, Bruce entertains while teaching us to avoid similar blunders. From "The Execution of Andrews" to "The Case of the Gambling Nobleman," there has never been a more exciting way to learn when to take a calculated risk-and how to spot a scam.

    Topics range from ruminations on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men to the haunting science fiction of J.G. Ballard; from the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell to the persistent agonies of anti-Semitism and jihad. Hitchens even looks at the recent financial crisis and argues for the enduring relevance of Karl Marx. The book forms a bridge between the two parallel enterprises of culture and politics. It reveals how politics justifies itself by culture, and how the latter prompts the former. In this fashion, Arguably burnishes Christopher Hitchens' credentials as (to quote Christopher Buckley) our "greatest living essayist in the English language."

    Lang, one of the worlds foremost origami artists and scientists, presents the never-before-described mathematical and geometric principles that allow anyone to design original origami, something once restricted to an elite few. From the theoretical underpinnings to detailed step-by-step folding sequences, this book takes a modern look at the centuries-old art of origami.

    Engineering professor Barbara Oakley knows firsthand how it feels to struggle with math. She flunked her way through high school math and science courses, before enlisting in the army immediately after graduation. When she saw how her lack of mathematical and technical savvy severely limited her options—both to rise in the military and to explore other careers—she returned to school with a newfound determination to re-tool her brain to master the very subjects that had given her so much trouble throughout her entire life. In A Mind for Numbers, Dr. Oakley lets us in on the secrets to effectively learning math and science—secrets that even dedicated and successful students wish they’d known earlier. Contrary to popular belief, math requires creative, as well as analytical, thinking. Most people think that there’s only one way to do a problem, when in actuality, there are often a number of different solutions—you just need the creativity to see them. For example, there are more than three hundred different known proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. In short, studying a problem in a laser-focused way until you reach a solution is not an effective way to learn math. Rather, it involves taking the time to step away from a problem and allow the more relaxed and creative part of the brain to take over. A Mind for Numbers shows us that we all have what it takes to excel in math, and learning it is not as painful as some might think!

    One can trace its roots to the Calculus of Variations and the work of Euler and Lagrange. This natural and reasonable approach to mathematical programming covers numerical methods for finite-dimensional optimization problems. It begins with very simple ideas progressing through more complicated concepts, concentrating on methods for both unconstrained and constrained optimization.

    At the time we were hoping that our approach of writing a book which would be both accessible without mathematical sophistication and portray these exiting new fields in an authentic manner would find an audience. Now we know it did. We know from many reviews and personal letters that the book is used in a wide range of ways: researchers use it to acquaint themselves, teachers use it in college and university courses, students use it for background reading, and there is also a substantial audience of lay people who just want to know what chaos and fractals are about. Every book that is somewhat technical in nature is likely to have a number of misprints and errors in its first edition. Some of these were caught and brought to our attention by our readers. One of them, Hermann Flaschka, deserves to be thanked in particular for his suggestions and improvements. This second edition has several changes. We have taken out the two appendices from the firstedition. At the time of the first edition Yuval Fishers contribution, which we published as an appendix was probably the first complete expository account on fractal image compression. Meanwhile, Yuvals book Fractal Image Compression: Theory and Application appeared and is now the publication to refer to.

    Professor Westfall treats all aspects of Newton's career, but his account centres on a full description of Newton's achievements in science. Thus the core of the work describes the development of the calculus, the experimentation that altered the direction of the science of optics, and especially the investigations in celestial dynamics that led to the law of universal gravitation.

    A comprehensive overview of all of Marvel's greatest heroes and villains furnishes profiles of more than one thousand characters that document their individual superpowers and their careers, in a reference that traces the history of Marvel Comics and encompasses stunning artwork by some of Marvel's greatest artists.

    This is such a book. Max Born is a Nobel Laureate (1955) and one of the world's great physicists: in this book he analyzes and interprets the theory of Einsteinian relativity. The result is undoubtedly the most lucid and insightful of all the books that have been written to explain the revolutionary theory that marked the end of the classical and the beginning of the modern era of physics.The author follows a quasi-historical method of presentation. The book begins with a review of the classical physics, covering such topics as origins of space and time measurements, geometric axioms, Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomy, concepts of equilibrium and force, laws of motion, inertia, mass, momentum and energy, Newtonian world system (absolute space and absolute time, gravitation, celestial mechanics, centrifugal forces, and absolute space), laws of optics (the corpuscular and undulatory theories, speed of light, wave theory, Doppler effect, convection of light by matter), electrodynamics (including magnetic induction, electromagnetic theory of light, electromagnetic ether, electromagnetic laws of moving bodies, electromagnetic mass, and the contraction hypothesis). Born then takes up his exposition of Einstein's special and general theories of relativity, discussing the concept of simultaneity, kinematics, Einstein's mechanics and dynamics, relativity of arbitrary motions, the principle of equivalence, the geometry of curved surfaces, and the space-time continuum, among other topics. Born then points out some predictions of the theory of relativity and its implications for cosmology, and indicates what is being sought in the unified field theory.This account steers a middle course between vague popularizations and complex scientific presentations. This is a careful discussion of principles stated in thoroughly acceptable scientific form, yet in a manner that makes it possible for the reader who has no scientific training to understand it. Only high school algebra has been used in explaining the nature of classical physics and relativity, and simple experiments and diagrams are used to illustrate each step. The layman and the beginning student in physics will find this an immensely valuable and usable introduction to relativity. This Dover 1962 edition was greatly revised and enlarged by Dr. Born.

    His influence on 20th-century thinking and issues is arguably unparalleled, affecting attitudes on sex, religion, art, culture, and more. Written for the layperson, Freud for Beginners explains the doctor's dogma with wit and clarity, all in a contemporary context.

    Originally published in 1637, it has been characterized as "the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences" (John Stuart Mill); as a book which "remade geometry and made modern geometry possible" (Eric Temple Bell). It "revolutionized the entire conception of the object of mathematical science" (J. Hadamard).With this volume Descartes founded modern analytical geometry. Reducing geometry to algebra and analysis and, conversely, showing that analysis may be translated into geometry, it opened the way for modern mathematics. Descartes was the first to classify curves systematically and to demonstrate algebraic solution of geometric curves. His geometric interpretation of negative quantities led to later concepts of continuity and the theory of function. The third book contains important contributions to the theory of equations.This edition contains the entire definitive Smith-Latham translation of Descartes' three books: Problems the Construction of which Requires Only Straight Lines and Circles; On the Nature of Curved Lines; and On the Construction of Solid and Supersolid Problems. Interleaved page by page with the translation is a complete facsimile of the 1637 French text, together with all Descartes' original illustrations; 248 footnotes explain the text and add further bibliography.