The Jungles of Randomness

The Jungles of Randomness PDF Author: Ivars Peterson
Publisher: Wiley
ISBN: 9780471295877
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
"Peterson's knowledge of and affection for mathematics comes through with every word."--San Diego Union Tribune. "Peterson is, in short, the math teacher everyone wishes they had in high school."--Publishers Weekly. "Peterson has honed his explanatory skills finely. He is a readable guide through the tangles of probability and random chance. The Jungles of Randomness will give some insight into one of the most fruitful areas where math meets practical living."--Christian Science Monitor. The delightful trek through the exotic and powerful world of randomness. Popular math author Ivars Peterson leads readers on an exciting foray into the wilds of randomness, introducing exciting new discoveries--from hidden rules governing games of chance to how the first molecules of life formed and how random numbers can protect sensitive information on the Internet. Along the way, he charts the ambiguous boundary between order and chaos, revealing the astonishing patterns so often hidden in apparent randomness as well as the startling randomness often embedded in apparent order. Ivars Peterson (Washington, D.C.) is the mathematics and physics editor at Science News and the author of four previous trade books, including The Mathematical Tourist and Islands of Truth: A Mathematical Mystery Cruise.

The Jungles of Randomness

The Jungles of Randomness PDF Author: Ivars Peterson
Publisher: Wiley
ISBN: 9780471295877
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Get Book

Book Description
"Peterson's knowledge of and affection for mathematics comes through with every word."--San Diego Union Tribune. "Peterson is, in short, the math teacher everyone wishes they had in high school."--Publishers Weekly. "Peterson has honed his explanatory skills finely. He is a readable guide through the tangles of probability and random chance. The Jungles of Randomness will give some insight into one of the most fruitful areas where math meets practical living."--Christian Science Monitor. The delightful trek through the exotic and powerful world of randomness. Popular math author Ivars Peterson leads readers on an exciting foray into the wilds of randomness, introducing exciting new discoveries--from hidden rules governing games of chance to how the first molecules of life formed and how random numbers can protect sensitive information on the Internet. Along the way, he charts the ambiguous boundary between order and chaos, revealing the astonishing patterns so often hidden in apparent randomness as well as the startling randomness often embedded in apparent order. Ivars Peterson (Washington, D.C.) is the mathematics and physics editor at Science News and the author of four previous trade books, including The Mathematical Tourist and Islands of Truth: A Mathematical Mystery Cruise.

Randomness

Randomness PDF Author: Deborah J. Bennett
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674020771
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
From the ancients' first readings of the innards of birds to your neighbor's last bout with the state lottery, humankind has put itself into the hands of chance. Today life itself may be at stake when probability comes into play--in the chance of a false negative in a medical test, in the reliability of DNA findings as legal evidence, or in the likelihood of passing on a deadly congenital disease--yet as few people as ever understand the odds. This book is aimed at the trouble with trying to learn about probability. A story of the misconceptions and difficulties civilization overcame in progressing toward probabilistic thinking, Randomness is also a skillful account of what makes the science of probability so daunting in our own day. To acquire a (correct) intuition of chance is not easy to begin with, and moving from an intuitive sense to a formal notion of probability presents further problems. Author Deborah Bennett traces the path this process takes in an individual trying to come to grips with concepts of uncertainty and fairness, and also charts the parallel path by which societies have developed ideas about chance. Why, from ancient to modern times, have people resorted to chance in making decisions? Is a decision made by random choice fair? What role has gambling played in our understanding of chance? Why do some individuals and societies refuse to accept randomness at all? If understanding randomness is so important to probabilistic thinking, why do the experts disagree about what it really is? And why are our intuitions about chance almost always dead wrong? Anyone who has puzzled over a probability conundrum is struck by the paradoxes and counterintuitive results that occur at a relatively simple level. Why this should be, and how it has been the case through the ages, for bumblers and brilliant mathematicians alike, is the entertaining and enlightening lesson of Randomness.

The Jungle Books

The Jungle Books PDF Author: Rudyard Kipling
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448155746
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
The Jungle Books tell the story of the irrepressible Mowgli, who is rescued as a baby from the jaws of the evil tiger, Shere Khan. Raised by wolves and guided by Baloo the bear, Mowgli and his animal friends embark on a series of hair-raising adventures through the jungles of India.

Mathematical Treks

Mathematical Treks PDF Author: Ivars Peterson
Publisher: MAA
ISBN: 9780883855379
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Collected articles on mathematics from the popular Math treks column; extra web support available.

An Adventurer's Guide to the Jungles of Time and Space

An Adventurer's Guide to the Jungles of Time and Space PDF Author: Mike Dooley
Publisher: TUTs Adventurers Club
ISBN: 0981460259
Category : Self-help techniques
Languages : en
Pages : 89

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Book Description
A story about the origins of space, time, miracles and more. "Lost in Space" offers a totally unique way for each of its readers to assess their own place in reality. This book is for all those who are in search of life's truths.

Random Justice

Random Justice PDF Author: Neil Duxbury
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199253531
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
This controversial book explores the potential for the use of lotteries in social, and particularly legal, decision-making contexts. Neil Duxbury considers in detail the history, advantages, and drawbacks of deciding issues of social significance by lot and argues that the value of the lottery as a legal decision-making device has generally been underestimated.

Fooled by Randomness

Fooled by Randomness PDF Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Editeurs divers USA
ISBN: 0399590455
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1570

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Book Description
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's landmark Incerto series is an investigation of luck, uncertainty, probability, opacity, human error, risk, disorder, and decision-making in a world we don't understand, in nonoverlapping and standalone books. All four volumes--Antifragile, The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, and the expanded edition of The Bed of Procrustes, updated with more than 50 percent new material--are now together in one boxed set. ANTIFRAGILE "Startling . . . richly crammed with insights, stories, fine phrases and intriguing asides."--The Wall Street Journal Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls "antifragile" is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. What is crucial is that the antifragile loves errors, as it incurs small harm and large benefits from them. Spanning politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine in an interdisciplinary and erudite style, Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. THE BLACK SWAN "[A book] that altered modern thinking."--The Times (London) A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random and more predictable. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. In this groundbreaking and prophetic book, Taleb shows that black swan events underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives, and yet we--especially the experts--are blind to them. FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS "[Fooled by Randomness] is to conventional Wall Street wisdom approximately what Martin Luther's ninety-five theses were to the Catholic Church."--Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker Are we capable of distinguishing the fortunate charlatan from the genuine visionary? Must we always try to uncover nonexistent messages in random events? Fooled by Randomness is about luck: more precisely, about how we perceive luck in our personal and professional experiences. Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill--the markets--Fooled by Randomness is an irreverent, eye-opening, and endlessly entertaining exploration of one of the least understood forces in our lives. THE BED OF PROCRUSTES "Taleb's crystalline nuggets of thought stand alone like esoteric poems."--Financial Times This collection of aphorisms and meditations expresses Taleb's major ideas in ways you least expect. The Bed of Procrustes takes its title from Greek mythology: the story of a man who made his visitors fit his bed to perfection by either stretching them or cutting their limbs. With a rare combination of pointed wit and potent wisdom, Taleb plows through human illusions, contrasting the classical views of courage, elegance, and erudition against the modern diseases of nerdiness, philistinism, and phoniness.

Risk, Opportunity, Uncertainty and Other Random Models

Risk, Opportunity, Uncertainty and Other Random Models PDF Author: Alan R. Jones
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351661299
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Risk, Opportunity, Uncertainty and Other Random Models (Volume V in the Working Guides to Estimating and Forecasting series) goes part way to debunking the myth that research and development cost are somewhat random, as under certain conditions they can be observed to follow a pattern of behaviour referred to as a Norden-Rayleigh Curve, which unfortunately has to be truncated to stop the myth from becoming a reality! However, there is a practical alternative in relation to a particular form of PERT-Beta Curve. However, the major emphasis of this volume is the use of Monte Carlo Simulation as a general technique for narrowing down potential outcomes of multiple interacting variables or cost drivers. Perhaps the most common of these in the evaluation of Risk, Opportunity and Uncertainty. The trouble is that many Monte Carlo Simulation tools are ‘black boxes’ and too few estimators and forecasters really appreciate what is happening inside the ‘black box’. This volume aims to resolve that and offers tips into things that might need to be considered to remove some of the uninformed random input that often creates a misinformed misconception of ‘it must be right!’ Monte Carlo Simulation can be used to model variable determine Critical Paths in a schedule, and is key to modelling Waiting Times and cues with random arisings. Supported by a wealth of figures and tables, this is a valuable resource for estimators, engineers, accountants, project risk specialists as well as students of cost engineering.

Fragments of Infinity

Fragments of Infinity PDF Author: Ivars Peterson
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
ISBN: 0470341122
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
A visual journey to the intersection of math and imagination, guided by an award-winning author Mathematics is right brain work, art left brain, right? Not so. This intriguing book shows how intertwined the disciplines are. Portraying the work of many contemporary artists in media from metals to glass to snow, Fragments of Infinity draws us into the mysteries of one-sided surfaces, four-dimensional spaces, self-similar structures, and other bizarre or seemingly impossible features of modern mathematics as they are given visible expression. Featuring more than 250 beautiful illustrations and photographs of artworks ranging from sculptures both massive and minute to elaborate geometric tapestries and mosaics of startling complexity, this is an enthralling exploration of abstract shapes, space, and time made tangible. Ivars Peterson (Washington, DC) is the mathematics writer and online editor of Science News and the author of The Jungles of Randomness (Wiley: 0-471-16449-6), as well as four previous trade books.

Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations

Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations PDF Author: Carl C. Gaither
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0387495770
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1895

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Book Description
Scientists and other keen observers of the natural world sometimes make or write a statement pertaining to scientific activity that is destined to live on beyond the brief period of time for which it was intended. This book serves as a collection of these statements from great philosophers and thought–influencers of science, past and present. It allows the reader quickly to find relevant quotations or citations. Organized thematically and indexed alphabetically by author, this work makes readily available an unprecedented collection of approximately 18,000 quotations related to a broad range of scientific topics.