Showing titles in Mathematics

Many people take math in high school and promptly forget much of it. But math plays a part in all of our lives all of the time, whether we know it or not. In The Joy of x, Steven Strogatz expands on his hit New York Times series to explain the big ideas of math gently and clearly, with wit, and insight.

You may have watched hundreds of episodes of The Simpsons (and its sister show Futurama) without ever realising that they contain enough maths to form an entire university course. In The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, Simon Singh explains how the brilliant writers, some of the mathematicians, have smuggled in mathematical jokes throughout the cartoon’s 25-year history, exploring everything from p to Mersenne primes, from Euler’s equation to the unsolved riddle of P vs. NP, from perfect numbers to narcissistic numbers and much more.

Every day, most of us will read or watch something in the news that is based on statistics in some way. Sometimes it'll be obvious—'X people develop cancer every year'—and sometimes less obvious—'How smartphones destroyed a generation'. Statistics are an immensely powerful tool for understanding the world, but in the wrong hands they can be dangerous. Introducing you to the common mistakes that journalists make and the tricks they sometimes deploy, How to Read Numbers is a vital guide that will help you understand when and how to trust the numbers in the news.

xGenius explores the interplay between analysis, tactics, and decision-making. It seeks to put the sport of football under the microscope with the aim of getting closer to the ultimate truth of what makes players, managers and teams successful. What, ultimately, wins football matches. Packed with examples from the Premier League and beyond, xGenius shows how xG and other performance analysis tools are helping answer previously unanswerable questions.

Aubrey Clayton traces the history of how statistics went astray, beginning with the groundbreaking work of the 17th-century mathematician Jacob Bernoulli and winding through gambling, astronomy, and genetics. Clayton recounts the feuds among rival schools of statistics, exploring the surprisingly human problems that gave rise to the discipline and the all-too-human shortcomings that derailed it.

In the bestselling The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver showed how forecasting would define the age of Big Data. Now, in this timely and riveting new book, Silver investigates "The River," or those whose mastery of risk allows them to shape—and dominate—so much of modern life. These professional risk takers—poker players and hedge fund managers, crypto true-believers and blue-chip art collectors—can teach us much about navigating the uncertainty of the 21st century. 

In Calculating the Cosmos, Ian Stewart presents an exhilarating guide to the cosmos, from our solar system to the entire universe. He describes the architecture of space and time, dark matter and dark energy, how galaxies form, why stars implode, how everything began, and how it's all going to end. He considers parallel universes, the fine-tuning of the cosmos for life, what forms extraterrestrial life might take, and the likelihood of life on Earth being snuffed out by an asteroid.

Probing the life and work of Kurt Gödel, Incompleteness indelibly portrays the tortured genius whose vision rocked the stability of mathematical reasoning—and brought him to the edge of madness.

In Zero, science journalist Charles Seife follows this innocent-looking number from its birth as an Eastern philosophical concept to its struggle for acceptance in Europe, its rise and transcendence in the West, and its ever-present threat to modern physics. 

Maths is the story of the world around us, and the wisdom it gives us can be the difference between success and disaster. We are all doing maths all the time, from the way we communicate with each other to the way we travel, from how we work to how we relax. Many of us are aware of this. But few...

Behind the familiar surfaces of the telephone, radio, and television lies a sophisticated and intriguing body of knowledge known as information theory. This is the theory that has permitted the rapid development of all sorts of communication, from color television to the clear transmission of photographs from the vicinity of Jupiter. Even more revolutionary progress is expected in the future.  

This audiobook is about luck, or more precisely, how we perceive and deal with luck in life and business. It is already a landmark work, and its title has entered our vocabulary. In its second edition, Fooled by Randomness is now a cornerstone for anyone interested in random outcomes.

Were it not for the calculus, mathematicians would have no way to describe the acceleration of a motorcycle or the effect of gravity on thrown balls and distant planets, or to prove that a man could cross a room and eventually touch the opposite wall. Just how calculus makes these things possible and in doing so finds a correspondence between real numbers and the real world is the subject of this dazzling book by a writer of extraordinary clarity and stylistic brio.

Britain’s most famous mathematician takes us to the edge of knowledge to show us what we cannot know. Is the universe infinite? Do we know what happened before the Big Bang? Where is human consciousness located in the brain? And are there more undiscovered particles out there, beyond the Higgs...

Brought to you by Penguin. From the UK’s ‘statistical national treasure’, a clever and data-driven guide to how we can live with risk and uncertainty We live in a world where uncertainty is inevitable. How should we deal with what we don’t know? And what role do chance, luck and...

An engaging, accessible introduction into how numbers work and why we shouldn’t be afraid of them, from maths expert Rachel Riley. Do you know your fractions from your percentages? Your adjacent to your hypotenuse? And who really knows how to do long division, anyway? Puzzled already? Don’t...

In 1937, Roger Penrose and his father discovered a sundial in a clearing behind their house in Colchester. In that machine made of light, shadow and time, six-year-old Roger discovered a 'world behind the world' of transcendently beautiful geometry. He had begun a journey that would make him one of the past century's most influential mathematicians, philosophers and physicists.

Brought to you by Penguin. Explore how speed influences every aspect of life on Earth, from the slow grind of geological processes and the fleeting lifespans of organisms to the astonishing speed of light and the remarkable adaptations of creatures like the swift antelope and the soaring...

Over two millennia ago, a Greek philosopher had a number of wondrous insights that paved the way to cosmology, physics, geography, meteorology, and biology, setting in motion a new way of seeing the world. In this elegant work, acclaimed physicist Carlo Rovelli brings to light the importance of Anaximander's overlooked legacy to modern science. He examines Anaximander as a scientist interested in shedding light on the deep nature of scientific thinking, which Rovelli locates in his rebellious ability to reimagine the world again and again.

Bayes' rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok. Sharon Bertsch McGrayne here explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it.