For centuries, the power of zero savored of the demonic; once harnessed, it became the most important tool in mathematics. Zero follows this number from its birth as an Eastern philosophical concept to its struggle for acceptance in Europe and its apotheosis as the mystery of the black hole. Today, zero lies at the heart of one of the biggest scientific controversies of all time, the quest for the theory of everything. Elegant, witty, and enlightening, Zero is a compelling look at the strangest number in the universe and one of the greatest paradoxes of human thought.

    How many of us understand the way seizures affect the brain, how the heart is connected to wellbeing, or the why the foot carries the key to our humanity? In Adventures in Human Being, award-winning author Gavin Francis leads readers on a journey into the hidden pathways of the human body, offering a guide to its inner workings and a celebration of its marvels.Drawing on his experiences as a surgeon, ER specialist, and family physician, Francis blends stories from the clinic with episodes from medical history, philosophy, and literature to describe the body in sickness and in health, in living and in dying. At its heart, Adventures in Human Being is a meditation on what it means to be human. Poetic, eloquent, and profoundly perceptive, this book will transform the way you view your body.

    Written by the 19th-century mathematician who also gave us "Alive in Wonderland", they are among the most entertaining logical works ever written, and contain some of the most thought-provoking puzzles ever devised.

    Hockney’s extensive research led him to conclude that artists such as Caravaggio, Velázquez, da Vinci, and other hyperrealists actually used optics and lenses to create their masterpieces.In this passionate yet pithy book, Hockney takes readers on a journey of discovery as he builds a case that mirrors and lenses were used by the great masters to create their highly detailed and realistic paintings and drawings. Hundreds of the best-known and best-loved paintings are reproduced alongside his straightforward analysis. Hockney also includes his own photographs and drawings to illustrate techniques used to capture such accurate likenesses. Extracts from historical and modern documents and correspondence with experts from around the world further illuminate this thought-provoking book that will forever change how the world looks at art.Secret Knowledge will open your eyes to how we perceive the world and how we choose to represent it.

    At the time, Watson was only 24, a young scientist hungry to make his mark. His uncompromisingly honest account of the heady days of their thrilling sprint against other world-class researchers to solve one of science's greatest mysteries gives a dazzlingly clear picture of a world of brilliant scientists with great gifts, very human ambitions & bitter rivalries. With humility unspoiled by false modesty, Watson relates his & Crick's desperate efforts to beat Linus Pauling to the Holy Grail of life sciences, the identification of the basic building block of life. Never has a scientist been so truthful in capturing in words the flavor of his work.

    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.

    Properly understood, they can tell us how the teams we root for could employ better strategies, put more effective players on the field, and win more games. The revolution in baseball statistics that began in the 1970s is a controversial subject that professionals and fans alike argue over without end. Despite this fundamental change in the way we watch and understand the sport, no one has written the book that reveals, across every area of strategy and management, how the best practitioners of statistical analysis in baseball-people like Bill James, Billy Beane, and Theo Epstein-think about numbers and the game. Baseball Between the Numbers is that book. In separate chapters covering every aspect of the game, from hitting, pitching, and fielding to roster construction and the scouting and drafting of players, the experts at Baseball Prospectus examine the subtle, hidden aspects of the game, bring them out into the open, and show us how our favorite teams could win more games. This is a book that every fan, every follower of sports radio, every fantasy player, every coach, and every player, at every level, can learn from and enjoy.

    Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane put physics and geometry at the core of his music. Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander follows suit, using jazz to answer physics' most vexing questions about the past and future of the universe. Following the great minds that first drew the links between music and physics-a list including Pythagoras, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, and Rakim-The Jazz of Physics reveals that the ancient poetic idea of the Music of the Spheres," taken seriously, clarifies confounding issues in physics. The Jazz of Physics will fascinate and inspire anyone interested in the mysteries of our universe, music, and life itself.

    Short-Cut Math is a concise, remarkably clear compendium of about 150 math short-cuts — timesaving tricks that provide faster, easier ways to add, subtract, multiply, and divide.By using the simple foolproof methods in this volume, you can double or triple your calculation speed — even if you always hated math in school. Here's a sampling of the amazingly effective techniques you will learn in minutes: Adding by 10 Groups; No-Carry Addition; Subtraction Without Borrowing; Multiplying by Aliquot Parts; Test for Divisibility by Odd and Even Numbers; Simplifying Dividends and Divisors; Fastest Way to Add or Subtract Any Pair of Fractions; Multiplying and Dividing with Mixed Numbers, and more.The short-cuts in this book require no special math ability. If you can do ordinary arithmetic, you will have no trouble with these methods. There are no complicated formulas or unfamiliar jargon — no long drills or exercises. For each problem, the author provides an explanation of the method and a step-by-step solution. Then the short-cut is applied, with a proof and an explanation of why it works.Students, teachers, businesspeople, accountants, bank tellers, check-out clerks — anyone who uses numbers and wishes to increase his or her speed and arithmetical agility, can benefit from the clear, easy-to-follow techniques given here.

    He believes that we should investigate what makes some countries more capable than others. Complex products—from films to robots, apps to automobiles—are a physical distillation of an economy’s knowledge, a measurable embodiment of its education, infrastructure, and capability. Economic wealth accrues when applications of this knowledge turn ideas into tangible products; the more complex its products, the more economic growth a country will experience.A radical new interpretation of global economics, Why Information Grows overturns traditional assumptions about the development of economies and the origins of wealth and takes a crucial step toward making economics less the dismal science and more the insightful one.

    It discusses new results, along with applications of probability theory to a variety of problems. The book contains many exercises and is suitable for use as a textbook on graduate-level courses involving data analysis. Aimed at readers already familiar with applied mathematics at an advanced undergraduate level or higher, it is of interest to scientists concerned with inference from incomplete information.

    But its myriad occurrences in art, nature, and science have been a source of speculation and wonder for thousands of years. Divine Proportion draws upon both religion and science to tell the story of Phi and to explore its manifestations in such diverse places as the structure of the inner ear, the spiral of a hurricane, the majesty of the Parthenon, and the elusive perfection of the Mona Lisa. A universal key to harmony, regeneration, and balance, Phi is at the heart of a tantalizing story begun on clay tablets in ancient Babylon, and which will continue to be written for centuries to come.

    Bridging the gap from geometry to the latest work in observational cosmology, the book illustrates the connection between geometry and the behavior of the physical universe and explains how radiation remaining from the big bang may reveal the actual shape of the universe.

    Yet Euler's formula is so simple it can be explained to a child. Euler's Gem tells the illuminating story of this indispensable mathematical idea.From ancient Greek geometry to today's cutting-edge research, Euler's Gem celebrates the discovery of Euler's beloved polyhedron formula and its far-reaching impact on topology, the study of shapes. In 1750, Euler observed that any polyhedron composed of V vertices, E edges, and F faces satisfies the equation V-E+F=2. David Richeson tells how the Greeks missed the formula entirely; how Descartes almost discovered it but fell short; how nineteenth-century mathematicians widened the formula's scope in ways that Euler never envisioned by adapting it for use with doughnut shapes, smooth surfaces, and higher dimensional shapes; and how twentieth-century mathematicians discovered that every shape has its own Euler's formula. Using wonderful examples and numerous illustrations, Richeson presents the formula's many elegant and unexpected applications, such as showing why there is always some windless spot on earth, how to measure the acreage of a tree farm by counting trees, and how many crayons are needed to color any map.Filled with a who's who of brilliant mathematicians who questioned, refined, and contributed to a remarkable theorem's development, Euler's Gem will fascinate every mathematics enthusiast.

    Verification that algorithms work is emphasized more than their complexity. An effective use of examples, and huge number of interesting exercises, demonstrate the topics of trees and distance, matchings and factors, connectivity and paths, graph coloring, edges and cycles, and planar graphs. For those who need to learn to make coherent arguments in the fields of mathematics and computer science.