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The achievements of great mathematical thinkers from ancient times to the modern age are examined through engaging, accessible text. Fascinating profiles of time-measurers like the Mayans and Huygens, arithmeticians like Pythagoras and al-Khwarizmi, logicians like Aristotle and Russell, and many more. Readers can follow along on these thinkers quests to explain the patterns in the world around them and to solve a wide range of theoretical and practical problems.
Photographs accompanied by autobiographical text written by each mathematician.
A mathematical journey through the most fascinating problems of extremes and how to solve them What is the best way to photograph a speeding bullet? How can lost hikers find their way out of a forest? Why does light move through glass in the least amount of time possible? When Least Is Best combines the mathematical history of extrema with contemporary examples to answer these intriguing questions and more. Paul Nahin shows how life often works at the extremes—with values becoming as small (or as large) as possible—and he considers how mathematicians over the centuries, including Descartes, Fermat, and Kepler, have grappled with these problems of minima and maxima. Throughout, Nahin examines entertaining conundrums, such as how to build the shortest bridge possible between two towns, how to vary speed during a race, and how to make the perfect basketball shot. Moving from medieval writings and modern calculus to the field of optimization, the engaging and witty explorations of When Least Is Best will delight math enthusiasts everywhere.
Looks at the history of mathematical discoveries and the lives of great mathematicians.
This entertaining book presents a collection of 180 famous mathematical puzzles and intriguing elementary problems that great mathematicians have posed, discussed, and/or solved. The selected problems do not require advanced mathematics, making this book accessible to a variety of readers. Mathematical recreations offer a rich playground for both amateur and professional mathematicians. Believing that creative stimuli and aesthetic considerations are closely related, great mathematicians from ancient times to the present have always taken an interest in puzzles and diversions. The goal of this book is to show that famous mathematicians have all communicated brilliant ideas, methodological ap...
Miracles, Mystics, Mathematicians: Searching for Deep Reality focuses on the lives and writings of some of history’s most influential mathematicians and the impact that their mystical beliefs had on their lives and on their mathematical work. Modern biographers often cleanse the lives of renowned scientists of any hint of mysticism or occultism. Such threads are sometimes regarded as relics of the superstitious past; flaws that need to be hushed up, marginalized, or reinterpreted. This book represents a minor attempt to push back against this tendency and to examine these aspects of the history of mathematics with seriousness and intellectual curiosity. Features A breadth of scope covering many centuries Suitable for anyone interested in mathematics, history, philosophy, paranormal phenomena, psi-research, mysticism, or in any combination of the above An almost unique account of known histories, examined from a new vantage point Sasho Kalajdzievski is a Senior Scholar in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Manitoba.
Women mathematicians of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and how they built professional identities in the face of social and institutional obstacles.
Although ideas from quantum physics play an important role in many parts of modern mathematics, there are few books about quantum mechanics aimed at mathematicians. This book introduces the main ideas of quantum mechanics in language familiar to mathematicians. Readers with little prior exposure to physics will enjoy the book's conversational tone as they delve into such topics as the Hilbert space approach to quantum theory; the Schrödinger equation in one space dimension; the Spectral Theorem for bounded and unbounded self-adjoint operators; the Stone–von Neumann Theorem; the Wentzel–Kramers–Brillouin approximation; the role of Lie groups and Lie algebras in quantum mechanics; and the path-integral approach to quantum mechanics. The numerous exercises at the end of each chapter make the book suitable for both graduate courses and independent study. Most of the text is accessible to graduate students in mathematics who have had a first course in real analysis, covering the basics of L2 spaces and Hilbert spaces. The final chapters introduce readers who are familiar with the theory of manifolds to more advanced topics, including geometric quantization.
It is amazing that the usual reply to being introduced to a mathematician is a stumbling apology about how bad someone is at mathematics, no matter how good they may be in reality. The problem is that we have come to view mathematics as an arcane branch of knowledge that only a few can aspire to understand or grasp. The sense of separation between those who have the knowledge and those who do not, is present even amongst academics where many of the same skills and research practices exist - intuition, the use of symbolic structures and the use of intuition and insight. The more worrying aspect of this separation is the ever declining numbers of students choosing mathematics as part of their ...