A Lost Mathematician, Takeo Nakasawa

A Lost Mathematician, Takeo Nakasawa PDF Author: Hirokazu Nishimura
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3764385731
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
Matroid theory was invented in the middle of the 1930s by two mathematicians independently, namely, Hassler Whitney in the USA and Takeo Nakasawa in Japan. Whitney became famous, but Nakasawa remained anonymous until two decades ago. He left only four papers to the mathematical community, all of them written in the middle of the 1930s. It was a bad time to have lived in a country that had become as eccentric as possible. Just as Nazism became more and more flamboyant in Europe in the 1930s, Japan became more and more esoteric and fanatical in the same time period. This book explains the little that is known about Nakasawa’s personal life in a Japan that had, among other failures, lost control over its military. This book contains his four papers in German and their English translations as well as some extended commentary on the history of Japan during those years. The book also contains 14 photos of him or his family. Although the veil of mystery surrounding Nakasawa’s life has only been partially lifted, the work presented in this book speaks eloquently of a tragic loss to the mathematical community.

A Lost Mathematician, Takeo Nakasawa

A Lost Mathematician, Takeo Nakasawa PDF Author: Hirokazu Nishimura
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3764385731
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book Here

Book Description
Matroid theory was invented in the middle of the 1930s by two mathematicians independently, namely, Hassler Whitney in the USA and Takeo Nakasawa in Japan. Whitney became famous, but Nakasawa remained anonymous until two decades ago. He left only four papers to the mathematical community, all of them written in the middle of the 1930s. It was a bad time to have lived in a country that had become as eccentric as possible. Just as Nazism became more and more flamboyant in Europe in the 1930s, Japan became more and more esoteric and fanatical in the same time period. This book explains the little that is known about Nakasawa’s personal life in a Japan that had, among other failures, lost control over its military. This book contains his four papers in German and their English translations as well as some extended commentary on the history of Japan during those years. The book also contains 14 photos of him or his family. Although the veil of mystery surrounding Nakasawa’s life has only been partially lifted, the work presented in this book speaks eloquently of a tragic loss to the mathematical community.

Mathematics, the Loss of Certainty

Mathematics, the Loss of Certainty PDF Author: Morris Kline
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781435108479
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description


Lost in Math

Lost in Math PDF Author: Sabine Hossenfelder
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465094260
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this "provocative" book (New York Times), a contrarian physicist argues that her field's modern obsession with beauty has given us wonderful math but bad science. Whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates popular theories from disposable ones. This is why, Sabine Hossenfelder argues, we have not seen a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for more than four decades. The belief in beauty has become so dogmatic that it now conflicts with scientific objectivity: observation has been unable to confirm mindboggling theories, like supersymmetry or grand unification, invented by physicists based on aesthetic criteria. Worse, these "too good to not be true" theories are actually untestable and they have left the field in a cul-de-sac. To escape, physicists must rethink their methods. Only by embracing reality as it is can science discover the truth.

Ramanujan's Lost Notebook

Ramanujan's Lost Notebook PDF Author: George E. Andrews
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387777660
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 423

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the spring of 1976, George Andrews of Pennsylvania State University visited the library at Trinity College, Cambridge, to examine the papers of the late G.N. Watson. Among these papers, Andrews discovered a sheaf of 138 pages in the handwriting of Srinivasa Ramanujan. This manuscript was soon designated "Ramanujan's lost notebook." The "lost notebook" contains considerable material on mock theta functions and so undoubtedly emanates from the last year of Ramanujan's life. It should be emphasized that the material on mock theta functions is perhaps Ramanujan's deepest work.

Ramanujan's Lost Notebook

Ramanujan's Lost Notebook PDF Author: George E. Andrews
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 038728124X
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 438

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the library at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1976, George Andrews of Pennsylvania State University discovered a sheaf of pages in the handwriting of Srinivasa Ramanujan. Soon designated as "Ramanujan’s Lost Notebook," it contains considerable material on mock theta functions and undoubtedly dates from the last year of Ramanujan’s life. In this book, the notebook is presented with additional material and expert commentary.

Lost in the Math Museum: A Survival Story

Lost in the Math Museum: A Survival Story PDF Author: Colin Adams
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
ISBN: 1470468581
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book Here

Book Description
“But when I turned the handle on the door, suddenly the buzzing went crazy. I slapped my hands over my ears, when I should have jerked the door shut. It flew open, and I was face-to-face with the Weierstrass function. It was the ugliest function I could imagine, with kinks, and kinks on kinks and kinks on those. And it was shrieking in its buzz-like way, vibrating all over like a plucked string. I stood there, frozen for just a second, and then I was sprinting after the others, with the wild frantic buzzing right behind me.” From the twisted imagination of best-selling author Colin Adams (Zombies & Calculus, The Knot Book) comes this tale of sixteen-year-old Kallie trying to escape death at the hands of the exhibits in a mathematics museum. Kallie crosses paths with Carl Gauss, Bertrand Russell, Sophie Germain, G. H. Hardy, and John von Neumann, as she tries to save herself, her dad, and his colleague Maria from the deadly Hairy Ball theorem, the harrowing Hilbert Hotel, the bisecting Ham Sandwich machine, and a variety of other mathematical menaces. It's a wild romp through a mathematical bestiary featuring the bizarre, the exotic, and the counterintuitive. You'll never think of math the same way again.

Geometry of Grief

Geometry of Grief PDF Author: Michael Frame
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022680108X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this profound and hopeful book, a mathematician and celebrated teacher shows how mathematics may help all of us—even the math-averse—to understand and cope with grief. We all know the euphoria of intellectual epiphany—the thrill of sudden understanding. But coupled with that excitement is a sense of loss: a moment of epiphany can never be repeated. In Geometry of Grief, mathematician Michael Frame draws on a career’s worth of insight—including his work with a pioneer of fractal geometry Benoit Mandelbrot—and a gift for rendering the complex accessible as he delves into this twinning of understanding and loss. Grief, Frame reveals, can be a moment of possibility. Frame investigates grief as a response to an irrevocable change in circumstance. This reframing allows us to see parallels between the loss of a loved one or a career and the loss of the elation of first understanding a tricky concept. From this foundation, Frame builds a geometric model of mental states. An object that is fractal, for example, has symmetry of magnification: magnify a picture of a mountain or a fern leaf—both fractal—and we see echoes of the original shape. Similarly, nested inside great loss are smaller losses. By manipulating this geometry, Frame shows us, we may be able to redirect our thinking in ways that help reduce our pain. Small-scale losses, in essence, provide laboratories to learn how to meet large-scale losses. Interweaving original illustrations, clear introductions to advanced topics in geometry, and wisdom gleaned from his own experience with illness and others’ remarkable responses to devastating loss, Frame’s poetic book is a journey through the beautiful complexities of mathematics and life. With both human sympathy and geometrical elegance, it helps us to see how a geometry of grief can open a pathway for bold action.

Re-reading Wilczek’s remark on “Lost in Math”: The perils of postempirical science and their resolution

Re-reading Wilczek’s remark on “Lost in Math”: The perils of postempirical science and their resolution PDF Author: Victor Christianto
Publisher: Infinite Study
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 10

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sabine Hossenfelder’s recent book “Lost in Math” has attracted numerous responses, including by notable physicists such as Frank Wilczek. In this article we focus on Wilczek’s remark on that book, in particular on the perils of postempirical science. We also discuss shortly multiverse hypothesis from philosophical perspective. In last section, we offer a resolution from the perspective of Neutrosophic Logic on this problem of classical tension between mathematics and experience approach to physics, which seems to cause the stagnation of modern physics.

The Calculus Diaries

The Calculus Diaries PDF Author: Jennifer Ouellette
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101459034
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
Kiss My Math meets A Tour of the Calculus Jennifer Ouellette never took math in college, mostly because she-like most people-assumed that she wouldn't need it in real life. But then the English-major-turned-award-winning-science-writer had a change of heart and decided to revisit the equations and formulas that had haunted her for years. The Calculus Diaries is the fun and fascinating account of her year spent confronting her math phobia head on. With wit and verve, Ouellette shows how she learned to apply calculus to everything from gas mileage to dieting, from the rides at Disneyland to shooting craps in Vegas-proving that even the mathematically challenged can learn the fundamentals of the universal language.

When Least Is Best

When Least Is Best PDF Author: Paul Nahin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691220387
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.