Mind Boggling Numbers

"This book presents a series of goofy questions that will help kids understand various mind-boggling math concepts."--

Could your pet help you with your math homework? Discover how amazing animals use number sense in this fun and fact-filled investigation. Animals know a lot more about numbers than you might think. Guppies can tell large numbers from small ones, hyenas can count, and chimpanzees can use Arabic numerals! Readers will get to know these extraordinary animals and more—and how scientists study their number sense. Each chapter wraps up with an interview with a researcher and a hands-on activity that give readers the chance to challenge their own math skills. Illustrations brimming with personality, along with colorful photos, sidebars, and splashy facts, make for an entertaining delve into these fascinating studies in this second book in the Extraordinary Animals series. A bibliography as well as an “Add to Your Knowledge” section at the back encourage more discovery.

Did you know that you can measure the height of buildings with your own shadow? Or that when you shuffle a pack of cards, chances are that no other pack of cards has ever been in that order, ever? This highly accessible, dynamic book is packed with fun, unexpected and awesome ideas about maths. It mixes a fresh, modern illustration style with punchy, eye-opening facts and humorous anecdotes about famous mathematicians and their groundbreaking discoveries. Ideal for children aged 8+.

For years, Christian math books have looked basically like secular textbooks, with the addition of a Bible verse here or there. Here, at last, is a book to help you transform your math class and show your child God’s handiwork in math! Revealing Arithmetic will help you: Teach math from a biblical worldview. Worship the Lord in math. Help your child really understand concepts. Train your child to think mathematically. Transform everyday activities and objects into math lessons. Teach your child to use math as a real-life tool. Explore historical methods and symbols. This book is designed for homeschool parents needing a simple math guide to use alongside their curriculum and help them teach arithmetic to elementary students, older students needing a review of math basics before moving on to advanced mathematics, or Christian school or co-op teachers (or future teachers) wanting ideas on how to modify the curriculum to better reveal the truth of a Creator God.

An examination of the stunning beauty of the brain's cellular form, with many color illustrations, and a provocative claim about the mind-brain relationship. The human brain is often described as the most complex object in the universe. Tens of billions of nerve cells-tiny tree-like structures—make up a massive network with enormous computational power. In this book, Giorgio Ascoli reveals another aspect of the human brain: the stunning beauty of its cellular form. Doing so, he makes a provocative claim about the mind-brain relationship. If each nerve cell enlarged a thousandfold looks like a tree, then a small region of the nervous system at the same magnified scale resembles a gigantic, fantastic forest. This structural majesty—illustrated throughout the book with extraordinary color images—hides the secrets behind the genesis of our mental states. Ascoli proposes that some of the most intriguing mysteries of the mind can be solved using the basic architectural principles of the brain. After an overview of the scientific and philosophical foundations of his argument, Ascoli links mental states with patterns of electrical activity in nerve cells, presents an emerging minority opinion of how the brain learns from experience, and unveils a radically new hypothesis of the mechanism determining what is learned, what isn't, and why. Finally, considering these notions in the context of the cosmic diversity within and among brains, Ascoli offers a new perspective on the roots of individuality and humanity.

Impressive statistics are thrown at us every day - the cost of health care; the size of an earthquake; the distance to the nearest star; the number of giraffes in the world. We know all these numbers are important - some more than others - and it's vaguely unsettling when we don't really have a clear sense of how remarkable or how ordinary they are. How do we work out what these figures actually mean? Are they significant, should we be worried, or excited, or impressed? How big is big, how small is small? With this entertaining and engaging book, help is at hand. Andrew Elliott gives us the tips and tools to make sense of numbers, to get a sense of proportion, to decipher what matters. It is a celebration of a numerate way of understanding the world. It shows how number skills help us to understand the everyday world close at hand, and how the same skills can be stretched to demystify the bigger numbers that we find in the wider contexts of science, politics, and the universe. Entertaining, full of practical examples, and memorable concepts, Is That A Big Number? renews our relationship with figures. If numbers are the musical notes with which the symphony of the universe is written, and you're struggling to hear the tune, then this is the book to get you humming again.

The universe is a mind-boggling place, full of things seemingly too big and too small to understand. How can we visualise the minuscule world of the atom and the vastness of our galaxy? How can we grasp a billionth of a second and a billion years? Or the freezing point of Helium and the heat generated by the blast of an atomic bomb?David Blatner's solution is to put these and many other 'inconceivable' items on six spectrums - numbers, size, light, sound, heat and time - that put them into a human perspective. Full of facts, illustrations and anecdotes, Spectrums proves that we really can make sense of our extraordinary universe.Visit spectrums.com for amazing interactive charts, videos and more

Drawing primarily from historical examples, this book explains the tremendous role that numbers and, in particular, mathematics play in all aspects of our civilization and culture. The lively style and illustrative examples will engage the reader who wants to understand the many ways in which mathematics enables science, technology, art, music, pol