Weird Maths

Maths is everywhere, in everything. It’s in the finest margins of modern sport. It’s in the electrical pulses of our hearts and the flight of every bird. It is our key to secret messages, lost languages and perhaps even the shape of the universe of itself. David Darling and Agnijo Banerjee reveal the mathematics at the farthest reaches of our world – from its role in the plots of novels to how animals employ numerical skills to survive. Along the way they explore what makes a genius, why a seemingly simple problem can confound the best and brightest for decades, and what might be the great discovery of the twenty-first century. As Bertrand Russell once said, ‘mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty’. Banerjee and Darling make sure we see it right again.

Even the most enthusiastic of maths students probably at one time wondered when exactly it would all prove useful in ‘real life’. Well, maths reaches so far and wide through our world that, love it or hate it, we’re all doing maths almost every minute of every day. David Darling and Agnijo Banerjee go in search of the perfect labyrinth, journey back to the second century in pursuit of ‘bubble maths’, reveal the weirdest mathematicians in history and transform the bewildering into the beautiful, delighting us once again.

A hilarious reeducation in mathematics-full of joy, jokes, and stick figures-that sheds light on the countless practical and wonderful ways that math structures and shapes our world. In Math With Bad Drawings, Ben Orlin reveals to us what math actually is; its myriad uses, its strange symbols, and the wild leaps of logic and faith that define the usually impenetrable work of the mathematician. Truth and knowledge come in multiple forms: colorful drawings, encouraging jokes, and the stories and insights of an empathetic teacher who believes that math should belong to everyone. Orlin shows us how to think like a mathematician by teaching us a brand-new game of tic-tac-toe, how to understand an economic crises by rolling a pair of dice, and the mathematical headache that ensues when attempting to build a spherical Death Star. Every discussion in the book is illustrated with Orlin's trademark "bad drawings," which convey his message and insights with perfect pitch and clarity. With 24 chapters covering topics from the electoral college to human genetics to the reasons not to trust statistics, Math with Bad Drawings is a life-changing book for the math-estranged and math-enamored alike.

Mathematics is beautiful--and it can be fun and exciting as well as practical. Good Math is your guide to some of the most intriguing topics from two thousand years of mathematics: from Egyptian fractions to Turing machines; from the real meaning of numbers to proof trees, group symmetry, and mechanical computation. If you've ever wondered what lay beyond the proofs you struggled to complete in high school geometry, or what limits the capabilities of computer on your desk, this is the book for you. Why do Roman numerals persist? How do we know that some infinities are larger than others? And how can we know for certain a program will ever finish? In this fast-paced tour of modern and not-so-modern math, computer scientist Mark Chu-Carroll explores some of the greatest breakthroughs and disappointments of more than two thousand years of mathematical thought. There is joy and beauty in mathematics, and in more than two dozen essays drawn from his popular "Good Math" blog, you'll find concepts, proofs, and examples that are often surprising, counterintuitive, or just plain weird. Mark begins his journey with the basics of numbers, with an entertaining trip through the integers and the natural, rational, irrational, and transcendental numbers. The voyage continues with a look at some of the oddest numbers in mathematics, including zero, the golden ratio, imaginary numbers, Roman numerals, and Egyptian and continuing fractions. After a deep dive into modern logic, including an introduction to linear logic and the logic-savvy Prolog language, the trip concludes with a tour of modern set theory and the advances and paradoxes of modern mechanical computing. If your high school or college math courses left you grasping for the inner meaning behind the numbers, Mark's book will both entertain and enlighten you.

'A monumental achievement - one of the great scientific biographies.' Michael Frayn The Strangest Man is the Costa Biography Award-winning account of Paul Dirac, the famous physicist sometimes called the British Einstein. He was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in twentieth-century science: quantum mechanics. The youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and legendarily unable to communicate or empathize. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather.Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and work. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship.The Strangest Man is an extraordinary and moving human story, as well as a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history. 'A wonderful book . . . Moving, sometimes comic, sometimes infinitely sad, and goes to the roots of what we mean by truth in science.' Lord Waldegrave, Daily Telegraph

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER AN ADAM SAVAGE BOOK CLUB PICK The book-length answer to anyone who ever put their hand up in math class and asked, “When am I ever going to use this in the real world?” “Fun, informative, and relentlessly entertaining, Humble Pi is a charming and very readable guide to some of humanity's all-time greatest miscalculations—that also gives you permission to feel a little better about some of your own mistakes.” —Ryan North, author of How to Invent Everything Our whole world is built on math, from the code running a website to the equations enabling the design of skyscrapers and bridges. Most of the time this math works quietly behind the scenes . . . until it doesn’t. All sorts of seemingly innocuous mathematical mistakes can have significant consequences. Math is easy to ignore until a misplaced decimal point upends the stock market, a unit conversion error causes a plane to crash, or someone divides by zero and stalls a battleship in the middle of the ocean. Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near misses, and mathematical mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman Empire, and an Olympic team, Matt Parker uncovers the bizarre ways math trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world. Getting it wrong has never been more fun.

How can we be sure that Pythagoras's theorem is really true? Why is the 'angle in a semicircle' always 90 degrees? And how can tangents help determine the speed of a bullet? David Acheson takes the reader on a highly illustrated tour through the history of geometry, from ancient Greece to the present day. He emphasizes throughout elegant deduction and practical applications, and argues that geometry can offer the quickest route to the whole spirit of mathematics at its best. Along the way, we encounter the quirky and the unexpected, meet the great personalities involved, and uncover some of the loveliest surprises in mathematics.