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Celestial Encounters traces the history of attempts to solve the problem of celestial mechanics first posited in Isaac Newton's Principia in 1686. More generally, the authors reflect on mathematical creativity and the roles that chance encounters, politics, and circumstance play in it. 23 halftones. 64 line illustrations.
Join the author as he pushes further and further in search of the truth.
The history and science behind efforts to predict major disasters, from tsunamis to stock market crashes Can we predict cataclysmic disasters such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or stock market crashes? The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 claimed more than 200,000 lives. Hurricane Katrina killed over 1,800 people and devastated the city of New Orleans. The recent global financial crisis has cost corporations and ordinary people around the world billions of dollars. Megadisasters is a book that asks why catastrophes such as these catch us by surprise, and reveals the history and groundbreaking science behind efforts to forecast major disasters and minimize their destruction. Each chapter of...
Have you ever wondered how we really know what year it is? Part detective story, part conspiracy theory, part scientific history, The Lost Millennium explores the astonishing possibility that our calendar is out by a thousand years. A chance conversation at a conference in Mexico started mathematician Florin Diacu on an amazing journey to make sense of one of the strangest — and if true, most revolutionary — theories you’ll ever encounter. To understand how scientists could be sceptical about what year it is, Florin Diacu explores the fascinating history of chronology — from Egyptian horoscopes to the work of Isaac Newton, with cameos by Voltaire and Edmund Halley — making the star...
"Brings together a number of lectures given between 1993 and 1999 as part of a special series hosted by the Federal University of Pernambuco, in which internationally established researchers came to Recife, Brazil, to lecture on classical or celestial mechanics. ... the editors have assembled nine of the lectures ... [which] includes a good balance of pure and applied research and of complete and incomplete results"--Bookjacket.
The classical Melnikov method provides information on the behavior of deterministic planar systems that may exhibit transitions, i.e. escapes from and captures into preferred regions of phase space. This book develops a unified treatment of deterministic and stochastic systems that extends the applicability of the Melnikov method to physically realizable stochastic planar systems with additive, state-dependent, white, colored, or dichotomous noise. The extended Melnikov method yields the novel result that motions with transitions are chaotic regardless of whether the excitation is deterministic or stochastic. It explains the role in the occurrence of transitions of the characteristics of the...
"Spherical trigonometry was at the heart of astronomy and ocean-going navigation for two millennia. The discipline was a mainstay of mathematics education for centuries, and it was a standard subject in high schools until the 1950s. Today, however, it is rarely taught. Heavenly Mathematics traces the rich history of this forgotten art, revealing how the cultures of classical Greece, medieval Islam, and the modern West used spherical trigonometry to chart the heavens and the Earth."--Jacket.
This book describes a revolutionary new approach to determining low energy routes for spacecraft and comets by exploiting regions in space where motion is very sensitive (or chaotic). It also represents an ideal introductory text to celestial mechanics, dynamical systems, and dynamical astronomy. Bringing together wide-ranging research by others with his own original work, much of it new or previously unpublished, Edward Belbruno argues that regions supporting chaotic motions, termed weak stability boundaries, can be estimated. Although controversial until quite recently, this method was in fact first applied in 1991, when Belbruno used a new route developed from this theory to get a stray J...
Approximately fifty articles that were published in The Mathematical Intelligencer during its first eighteen years. The selection demonstrates the wide variety of attractive articles that have appeared over the years, ranging from general interest articles of a historical nature to lucid expositions of important current discoveries. Each article is introduced by the editors. "...The Mathematical Intelligencer publishes stylish, well-illustrated articles, rich in ideas and usually short on proofs. ...Many, but not all articles fall within the reach of the advanced undergraduate mathematics major. ... This book makes a nice addition to any undergraduate mathematics collection that does not already sport back issues of The Mathematical Intelligencer." D.V. Feldman, University of New Hamphire, CHOICE Reviews, June 2001.
An unrivaled text in the field of celestial mechanics, Moulton's theoretical work on the prediction and interpretation of celestial phenomena has not been superseded. By providing a general account of all parts of celestial mechanics without an over-full treatment of any single aspect, by stating all the problems in advance, and, where the transformations are long, giving an outline of the steps which must be made, and by noting all the places where assumptions have been introduced or unjustified methods employed, Moulton has insured that his work will be valuable to all who are interested in the subject. The text is divided into ten chapters which progress logically in terms of the difficul...