Author: E. W. Hobson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107624509
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 53
Book Description
Originally published in 1914, this volume was created to mark the tercentenary of John Napier's Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio. Written by the prominent English mathematician Ernest William Hobson, the text provides a highly readable introduction to the theory of logarithms and puts their discovery within a historical context. Illustrations are also included. This is a concise and accessible book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in logarithms and the history of mathematics.
John Napier and the Invention of Logarithms, 1614
Author: E. W. Hobson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107624509
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 53
Book Description
Originally published in 1914, this volume was created to mark the tercentenary of John Napier's Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio. Written by the prominent English mathematician Ernest William Hobson, the text provides a highly readable introduction to the theory of logarithms and puts their discovery within a historical context. Illustrations are also included. This is a concise and accessible book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in logarithms and the history of mathematics.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107624509
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 53
Book Description
Originally published in 1914, this volume was created to mark the tercentenary of John Napier's Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio. Written by the prominent English mathematician Ernest William Hobson, the text provides a highly readable introduction to the theory of logarithms and puts their discovery within a historical context. Illustrations are also included. This is a concise and accessible book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in logarithms and the history of mathematics.
The Wonderful Canon of Logarithms, ... with a Full Description of Their Ready Use and Easy Application. ... Retranslated from the Latin Text, and Enlarged ... by H. Filipowski
Author: John Napier
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Book Description
John Napier
Author: Julian Havil
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400852188
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
The most comprehensive account of the mathematician's life and work John Napier (1550–1617) is celebrated today as the man who invented logarithms—an enormous intellectual achievement that would soon lead to the development of their mechanical equivalent in the slide rule: the two would serve humanity as the principal means of calculation until the mid-1970s. Yet, despite Napier's pioneering efforts, his life and work have not attracted detailed modern scrutiny. John Napier is the first contemporary biography to take an in-depth look at the multiple facets of Napier’s story: his privileged position as the eighth Laird of Merchiston and the son of influential Scottish landowners; his reputation as a magician who dabbled in alchemy; his interest in agriculture; his involvement with a notorious outlaw; his staunch anti-Catholic beliefs; his interactions with such peers as Henry Briggs, Johannes Kepler, and Tycho Brahe; and, most notably, his estimable mathematical legacy. Julian Havil explores Napier’s original development of logarithms, the motivations for his approach, and the reasons behind certain adjustments to them. Napier’s inventive mathematical ideas also include formulas for solving spherical triangles, "Napier’s Bones" (a more basic but extremely popular alternative device for calculation), and the use of decimal notation for fractions and binary arithmetic. Havil also considers Napier’s study of the Book of Revelation, which led to his prediction of the Apocalypse in his first book, A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John—the work for which Napier believed he would be most remembered. John Napier assesses one man’s life and the lasting influence of his advancements on the mathematical sciences and beyond.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400852188
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
The most comprehensive account of the mathematician's life and work John Napier (1550–1617) is celebrated today as the man who invented logarithms—an enormous intellectual achievement that would soon lead to the development of their mechanical equivalent in the slide rule: the two would serve humanity as the principal means of calculation until the mid-1970s. Yet, despite Napier's pioneering efforts, his life and work have not attracted detailed modern scrutiny. John Napier is the first contemporary biography to take an in-depth look at the multiple facets of Napier’s story: his privileged position as the eighth Laird of Merchiston and the son of influential Scottish landowners; his reputation as a magician who dabbled in alchemy; his interest in agriculture; his involvement with a notorious outlaw; his staunch anti-Catholic beliefs; his interactions with such peers as Henry Briggs, Johannes Kepler, and Tycho Brahe; and, most notably, his estimable mathematical legacy. Julian Havil explores Napier’s original development of logarithms, the motivations for his approach, and the reasons behind certain adjustments to them. Napier’s inventive mathematical ideas also include formulas for solving spherical triangles, "Napier’s Bones" (a more basic but extremely popular alternative device for calculation), and the use of decimal notation for fractions and binary arithmetic. Havil also considers Napier’s study of the Book of Revelation, which led to his prediction of the Apocalypse in his first book, A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John—the work for which Napier believed he would be most remembered. John Napier assesses one man’s life and the lasting influence of his advancements on the mathematical sciences and beyond.
Making up Numbers: A History of Invention in Mathematics
Author: Ekkehard Kopp
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1800640978
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
Making up Numbers: A History of Invention in Mathematics offers a detailed but accessible account of a wide range of mathematical ideas. Starting with elementary concepts, it leads the reader towards aspects of current mathematical research. The book explains how conceptual hurdles in the development of numbers and number systems were overcome in the course of history, from Babylon to Classical Greece, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and so to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The narrative moves from the Pythagorean insistence on positive multiples to the gradual acceptance of negative numbers, irrationals and complex numbers as essential tools in quantitative analysis. Within this chronological framework, chapters are organised thematically, covering a variety of topics and contexts: writing and solving equations, geometric construction, coordinates and complex numbers, perceptions of ‘infinity’ and its permissible uses in mathematics, number systems, and evolving views of the role of axioms. Through this approach, the author demonstrates that changes in our understanding of numbers have often relied on the breaking of long-held conventions to make way for new inventions at once providing greater clarity and widening mathematical horizons. Viewed from this historical perspective, mathematical abstraction emerges as neither mysterious nor immutable, but as a contingent, developing human activity. Making up Numbers will be of great interest to undergraduate and A-level students of mathematics, as well as secondary school teachers of the subject. In virtue of its detailed treatment of mathematical ideas, it will be of value to anyone seeking to learn more about the development of the subject.
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1800640978
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Book Description
Making up Numbers: A History of Invention in Mathematics offers a detailed but accessible account of a wide range of mathematical ideas. Starting with elementary concepts, it leads the reader towards aspects of current mathematical research. The book explains how conceptual hurdles in the development of numbers and number systems were overcome in the course of history, from Babylon to Classical Greece, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, and so to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The narrative moves from the Pythagorean insistence on positive multiples to the gradual acceptance of negative numbers, irrationals and complex numbers as essential tools in quantitative analysis. Within this chronological framework, chapters are organised thematically, covering a variety of topics and contexts: writing and solving equations, geometric construction, coordinates and complex numbers, perceptions of ‘infinity’ and its permissible uses in mathematics, number systems, and evolving views of the role of axioms. Through this approach, the author demonstrates that changes in our understanding of numbers have often relied on the breaking of long-held conventions to make way for new inventions at once providing greater clarity and widening mathematical horizons. Viewed from this historical perspective, mathematical abstraction emerges as neither mysterious nor immutable, but as a contingent, developing human activity. Making up Numbers will be of great interest to undergraduate and A-level students of mathematics, as well as secondary school teachers of the subject. In virtue of its detailed treatment of mathematical ideas, it will be of value to anyone seeking to learn more about the development of the subject.
Analytic Combinatorics
Author: Philippe Flajolet
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139477161
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 825
Book Description
Analytic combinatorics aims to enable precise quantitative predictions of the properties of large combinatorial structures. The theory has emerged over recent decades as essential both for the analysis of algorithms and for the study of scientific models in many disciplines, including probability theory, statistical physics, computational biology, and information theory. With a careful combination of symbolic enumeration methods and complex analysis, drawing heavily on generating functions, results of sweeping generality emerge that can be applied in particular to fundamental structures such as permutations, sequences, strings, walks, paths, trees, graphs and maps. This account is the definitive treatment of the topic. The authors give full coverage of the underlying mathematics and a thorough treatment of both classical and modern applications of the theory. The text is complemented with exercises, examples, appendices and notes to aid understanding. The book can be used for an advanced undergraduate or a graduate course, or for self-study.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139477161
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 825
Book Description
Analytic combinatorics aims to enable precise quantitative predictions of the properties of large combinatorial structures. The theory has emerged over recent decades as essential both for the analysis of algorithms and for the study of scientific models in many disciplines, including probability theory, statistical physics, computational biology, and information theory. With a careful combination of symbolic enumeration methods and complex analysis, drawing heavily on generating functions, results of sweeping generality emerge that can be applied in particular to fundamental structures such as permutations, sequences, strings, walks, paths, trees, graphs and maps. This account is the definitive treatment of the topic. The authors give full coverage of the underlying mathematics and a thorough treatment of both classical and modern applications of the theory. The text is complemented with exercises, examples, appendices and notes to aid understanding. The book can be used for an advanced undergraduate or a graduate course, or for self-study.
High-Dimensional Probability
Author: Roman Vershynin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108415199
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Book Description
An integrated package of powerful probabilistic tools and key applications in modern mathematical data science.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108415199
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 299
Book Description
An integrated package of powerful probabilistic tools and key applications in modern mathematical data science.
Rabdology
Author: John Napier
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 184
Book Description
This first English translation of Napier's Rabdologia provides a clear and readable introduction to a group of physical calculating devices, which, long overshadowed by Napier's logarithms, have their own intrinsic interest and charm. "The tasks which fill'd beginners with dismayThis little book has banish'd clear away." John Napier had already discovered and published an epochmaking treatise on logarithms when in 1617 he turned to "rabdology" or rod-reckoning as yet another means by which to confront the problem of simplifying the huge calculations involved in multiplication, division, and the extraction of roots. This first English translation of Napier's Rabdologia provides a clear and readable introduction to a group of physical calculating devices, which, long overshadowed by Napier's logarithms, have their own intrinsic interest and charm. Book I describes the first device, a set of rods known as "Napier's Bones," which were inscribed with numbers forming multiplication tables and used in conjunction with pencil and paper. Book 11 presents a series of simple calculations that readers can solve by using the rods, and a series of tables of ratios useful for division. Napier then describes the second mechanical device for calculation, a forerunner of the modern calculator that he named promptuary or "place where things are stored ready for use." The third device, similar to a chessboard, allowed calculations to be performed by moving counters around the squares. Observing that the numbers had to be represented in what would now be called binary form, Napier provides instructions for changing from ordinary to binary numbers and back again, a method that worked equally well for multiplication and division and that had a particularly elegant symmetry when applied to the extraction of square roots.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 184
Book Description
This first English translation of Napier's Rabdologia provides a clear and readable introduction to a group of physical calculating devices, which, long overshadowed by Napier's logarithms, have their own intrinsic interest and charm. "The tasks which fill'd beginners with dismayThis little book has banish'd clear away." John Napier had already discovered and published an epochmaking treatise on logarithms when in 1617 he turned to "rabdology" or rod-reckoning as yet another means by which to confront the problem of simplifying the huge calculations involved in multiplication, division, and the extraction of roots. This first English translation of Napier's Rabdologia provides a clear and readable introduction to a group of physical calculating devices, which, long overshadowed by Napier's logarithms, have their own intrinsic interest and charm. Book I describes the first device, a set of rods known as "Napier's Bones," which were inscribed with numbers forming multiplication tables and used in conjunction with pencil and paper. Book 11 presents a series of simple calculations that readers can solve by using the rods, and a series of tables of ratios useful for division. Napier then describes the second mechanical device for calculation, a forerunner of the modern calculator that he named promptuary or "place where things are stored ready for use." The third device, similar to a chessboard, allowed calculations to be performed by moving counters around the squares. Observing that the numbers had to be represented in what would now be called binary form, Napier provides instructions for changing from ordinary to binary numbers and back again, a method that worked equally well for multiplication and division and that had a particularly elegant symmetry when applied to the extraction of square roots.
Analytic Combinatorics in Several Variables
Author: Robin Pemantle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107031575
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 395
Book Description
Aimed at graduate students and researchers in enumerative combinatorics, this book is the first to treat the analytic aspects of combinatorial enumeration from a multivariate perspective.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107031575
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 395
Book Description
Aimed at graduate students and researchers in enumerative combinatorics, this book is the first to treat the analytic aspects of combinatorial enumeration from a multivariate perspective.
Cognition in the Wild
Author: Edwin Hutchins
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262581469
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 403
Book Description
Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation—its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory—"in the wild." Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen in the cracks between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that are different from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them. Each action for bringing a large naval vessel into port, for example, is informed by culture: the navigation team can be seen as a cognitive and computational system. Introducing Navy life and work on the bridge, Hutchins makes a clear distinction between the cognitive properties of an individual and the cognitive properties of a system. In striking contrast to the usual laboratory tasks of research in cognitive science, he applies the principal metaphor of cognitive science—cognition as computation (adopting David Marr's paradigm)—to the navigation task. After comparing modern Western navigation with the method practiced in Micronesia, Hutchins explores the computational and cognitive properties of systems that are larger than an individual. He then turns to an analysis of learning or change in the organization of cognitive systems at several scales. Hutchins's conclusion illustrates the costs of ignoring the cultural nature of cognition, pointing to the ways in which contemporary cognitive science can be transformed by new meanings and interpretations. A Bradford Book
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262581469
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 403
Book Description
Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation—its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory—"in the wild." Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen in the cracks between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that are different from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them. Each action for bringing a large naval vessel into port, for example, is informed by culture: the navigation team can be seen as a cognitive and computational system. Introducing Navy life and work on the bridge, Hutchins makes a clear distinction between the cognitive properties of an individual and the cognitive properties of a system. In striking contrast to the usual laboratory tasks of research in cognitive science, he applies the principal metaphor of cognitive science—cognition as computation (adopting David Marr's paradigm)—to the navigation task. After comparing modern Western navigation with the method practiced in Micronesia, Hutchins explores the computational and cognitive properties of systems that are larger than an individual. He then turns to an analysis of learning or change in the organization of cognitive systems at several scales. Hutchins's conclusion illustrates the costs of ignoring the cultural nature of cognition, pointing to the ways in which contemporary cognitive science can be transformed by new meanings and interpretations. A Bradford Book
The Constitution of Algorithms
Author: Florian Jaton
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262542145
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 401
Book Description
A laboratory study that investigates how algorithms come into existence. Algorithms--often associated with the terms big data, machine learning, or artificial intelligence--underlie the technologies we use every day, and disputes over the consequences, actual or potential, of new algorithms arise regularly. In this book, Florian Jaton offers a new way to study computerized methods, providing an account of where algorithms come from and how they are constituted, investigating the practical activities by which algorithms are progressively assembled rather than what they may suggest or require once they are assembled.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262542145
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 401
Book Description
A laboratory study that investigates how algorithms come into existence. Algorithms--often associated with the terms big data, machine learning, or artificial intelligence--underlie the technologies we use every day, and disputes over the consequences, actual or potential, of new algorithms arise regularly. In this book, Florian Jaton offers a new way to study computerized methods, providing an account of where algorithms come from and how they are constituted, investigating the practical activities by which algorithms are progressively assembled rather than what they may suggest or require once they are assembled.