Mathematics And Mathematicians

A brilliant tour of mathematical thought and a guide to becoming a better thinker, How Not to Be Wrong shows that math is not just a long list of rules to be learned and carried out by rote. Math touches everything we do; It's what makes the world make sense. Using the mathematician's methods and hard-won insights-minus the jargon-professor and popular columnist Jordan Ellenberg guides general readers through his ideas with rigor and lively irreverence, infusing everything from election results to baseball to the existence of God and the psychology of slime molds with a heightened sense of clarity and wonder. Armed with the tools of mathematics, we can see the hidden structures beneath the messy and chaotic surface of our daily lives. How Not to Be Wrong shows us how--Publisher's description.

To many outsiders, mathematicians appear to think like computers, grimly grinding away with a strict formal logic and moving methodically--even algorithmically--from one black-and-white deduction to another. Yet mathematicians often describe their most important breakthroughs as creative, intuitive responses to ambiguity, contradiction, and paradox. A unique examination of this less-familiar aspect of mathematics, How Mathematicians Think reveals that mathematics is a profoundly creative activity and not just a body of formalized rules and results. Nonlogical qualities, William Byers shows, play an essential role in mathematics. Ambiguities, contradictions, and paradoxes can arise when ideas developed in different contexts come into contact. Uncertainties and conflicts do not impede but rather spur the development of mathematics. Creativity often means bringing apparently incompatible perspectives together as complementary aspects of a new, more subtle theory. The secret of mathematics is not to be found only in its logical structure. The creative dimensions of mathematical work have great implications for our notions of mathematical and scientific truth, and How Mathematicians Think provides a novel approach to many fundamental questions. Is mathematics objectively true? Is it discovered or invented? And is there such a thing as a "final" scientific theory? Ultimately, How Mathematicians Think shows that the nature of mathematical thinking can teach us a great deal about the human condition itself.

This book offers a unique perspective on ways in which mathematicians: perceive their students' learning; teach; reflect on their teaching practice. Elena Nardi achieves this by employing two fictional, yet entirely data-grounded, characters to create a conversation on these important issues. The construction of these characters is based on large bodies of data including intense focused group interviews with mathematicians and extensive analyses of students' written work, collected and analyzed over a substantial period.

Mathematical Perspectives: Essays on Mathematics and its Historical Development is a collection of 13 biographical essays on the historical advances of science. This collection is originally meant to comprise an issue of the journal Historia Mathematica in honor of Professor Kurt R. Biermann’s 60th birthday. This 12-chapter text includes essays on studies and commentaries on the problem of “figures of equal perimeter by various authors in antiquity, including Zenodorus, Theon, and Pappus. Other essays explore the comparison of the areas of polygons with equal perimeter; the concept of function; history of mathematics; the development of mathematical physics in France; and the history of Logicism and Formalism. The remaining chapters deal with essays on an early version of Gauss’ Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, ideal numbers, a mathematical-philosophilica theory of probability, and historical examples of problem of number sequence interpolation. This book will be of value to mathematicians, historians, and researchers.

In this engaging text, Michael Weiss offers an advanced view of the secondary mathematics curriculum through the prism of theory, analysis, and history, aiming to take an intellectually and mathematically mature perspective on the content normally taught in high school mathematics courses. Rather than a secondary mathematics textbook, Weiss presents here a textbook about the secondary mathematics curriculum, written for mathematics educators and mathematicians and presenting a long-overdue modern-day integration of the disparate topics and methods of secondary mathematics into a coherent mathematical theory. Areas covered include: Polynomials and polynomial functions; Geometry, graphs, and symmetry; Abstract algebra, linear algebra, and solving equations; Exponential and logarithmic functions; Complex numbers; The historical development of the secondary mathematics curriculum. Written using precise definitions and proofs throughout on a foundation of advanced content knowledge, Weiss offers a compelling and timely investigation into the secondary mathematics curriculum, relevant for preservice secondary teachers as well as graduate students and scholars in both mathematics and mathematics education.

Looking for a head start in your undergraduate degree in mathematics? Maybe you've already started your degree and feel bewildered by the subject you previously loved? Don't panic! This friendly companion will ease your transition to real mathematical thinking. Working through the book you will develop an arsenal of techniques to help you unlock the meaning of definitions, theorems and proofs, solve problems, and write mathematics effectively. All the major methods of proof - direct method, cases, induction, contradiction and contrapositive - are featured. Concrete examples are used throughout, and you'll get plenty of practice on topics common to many courses such as divisors, Euclidean algorithms, modular arithmetic, equivalence relations, and injectivity and surjectivity of functions. The material has been tested by real students over many years so all the essentials are covered. With over 300 exercises to help you test your progress, you'll soon learn how to think like a mathematician.

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Women mathematicians of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and how they built professional identities in the face of social and institutional obstacles.