Twenty Years Before the Blackboard

Twenty Years Before the Blackboard PDF Author: Michael Stueben
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780883855256
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
This book is the legacy of twenty years of mathematics teaching: part philosophy, part humour, and completely fascinating.

Twenty Years Before the Blackboard

Twenty Years Before the Blackboard PDF Author: Michael Stueben
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780883855256
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
This book is the legacy of twenty years of mathematics teaching: part philosophy, part humour, and completely fascinating.

Mathematical Apocrypha Redux

Mathematical Apocrypha Redux PDF Author: Steven G. Krantz
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780883855546
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
A volume of anecdotes, stories, quips, and ruminations about mathematics and mathematicians.

Aha! A Two Volume Collection

Aha! A Two Volume Collection PDF Author: Martin Gardner
Publisher: MAA
ISBN: 9780883855515
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Previously published separately, the two books aha! Gotcha and aha! Insight are here combined as a single volume. The aha! books, as they are referred to by fans of Martin Gardner, contain 144 wonderful puzzles from the reigning king of recreational mathematics. In this combined volume, you will find puzzles ranging over geometry, logic, probability, statistics, number, time, combinatorics, and word play. Gardner calls these puzzles aha! problems, that 'seem difficult, and indeed are difficult if you go about trying to solve them in traditional ways. But if you can free your mind from standard problem solving techniques, you may be receptive to an aha! reaction that leads immediately to a solution. Don't be discouraged if, at first, you have difficulty with these problems. After a while you will begin to catch the spirit of offbeat, nonlinear thinking, and you may be surprised to find your aha! ability improving.'

Remarkable Mathematicians

Remarkable Mathematicians PDF Author: Ioan James
Publisher: Mathematical Association of America
ISBN: 9780521817776
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Ioan James introduces and profiles sixty mathematicians from the era when mathematics was freed from its classical origins to develop into its modern form. The subjects, all born between 1700 and 1910, come from a wide range of countries, and all made important contributions to mathematics, through their ideas, their teaching, and their influence. James emphasizes their varied life stories, not the details of their mathematical achievements. The book is organized chronologically into ten chapters, each of which contains biographical sketches of six mathematicians. The men and women James has chosen to portray are representative of the history of mathematics, such that their stories, when read in sequence, convey in human terms something of the way in which mathematics developed. Ioan James is a professor at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. He is the author of Topological Topics (Cambridge, 1983), Fibrewise Topology (Cambridge, 1989), Introduction to Uniform Spaces (Cambridge, 1990), Topological and Uniform Spaces (Springer-Verlag New York, 1999), and co-author with Michael C. Crabb of Fibrewise Homotopy Theory (Springer-Verlag New York, 1998). James is the former editor of the London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series and volume editor of numerous books. He is the organizer of the Oxford Series of Topology symposia and other conferences, and co-chairman of the Task Force for Mathematical Sciences of Campaign for Oxford.

Phi, Pi, e and i

Phi, Pi, e and i PDF Author: David Perkins
Publisher: The Mathematical Association of America
ISBN: 0883855895
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
Certain constants occupy precise balancing points in the cosmos of number, like habitable planets sprinkled throughout our galaxy at just the right distances from their suns. This book introduces and connects four of these constants (φ, π, e and i), each of which has recently been the individual subject of historical and mathematical expositions. But here we discuss their properties, as a group, at a level appropriate for an audience armed only with the tools of elementary calculus. This material offers an excellent excuse to display the power of calculus to reveal elegant truths that are not often seen in college classes. These truths are described here via the work of such luminaries as Nilakantha, Liu Hui, Hemachandra, Khayyám, Newton, Wallis, and Euler. The book is written with the goal that an undergraduate student can read the book solo. With this goal in mind, the author provides endnotes throughout, in case the reader is unable to work out some of the missing steps. Those endnotes appear in the last chapter, Extra Help. Each chapter concludes with a series of exercises, all of which introduce new historical figures or content.

Sophie’s Diary

Sophie’s Diary PDF Author: Dora Musielak
Publisher: American Mathematical Society
ISBN: 1470471566
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Sophie Germain overcame gender stigmas and a lack of formal education to prove that for all prime exponents less than 100 Case I of Fermat's Last Theorem holds. Hidden behind a man's name, her brilliance as mathematician was first discovered by three of the greatest scholars of the eighteenth century, Lagrange, Gauss, and Legendre. In Sophie's Diary, Germain comes to life through a fictionalized journal that intertwines mathematics with historical descriptions of the brutal events that took place in Paris between 1789 and 1793. This format provides a plausible perspective of how a young Sophie could have learned mathematics on her own—both fascinated by numbers and eager to master tough subjects without a teacher's guidance. Her passion for mathematics is integrated into her personal life as an escape from societal outrage. Sophie's Diary is suitable for a variety of readers—both young and old, mathematicians and novices—who will be inspired and enlightened on a field of study made easy, as told through the intellectual and personal struggles of an exceptional young woman.

The Edge of the Universe

The Edge of the Universe PDF Author: Deanna Haunsperger
Publisher: MAA
ISBN: 9780883855553
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Exquisite expositions of mathematics taken from the first ten years of the Math Horizons magazine.

Sherlock Holmes in Babylon and Other Tales of Mathematical History

Sherlock Holmes in Babylon and Other Tales of Mathematical History PDF Author: Marlow Anderson
Publisher: American Mathematical Society
ISBN: 1470470039
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Covering a span of almost 4000 years, from the ancient Babylonians to the eighteenth century, this collection chronicles the enormous changes in mathematical thinking over this time as viewed by distinguished historians of mathematics from the past and the present. Each of the four sections of the book (Ancient Mathematics, Medieval and Renaissance Mathematics, The Seventeenth Century, The Eighteenth Century) is preceded by a Foreword, in which the articles are put into historical context, and followed by an Afterword, in which they are reviewed in the light of current historical scholarship. In more than one case, two articles on the same topic are included to show how knowledge and views about the topic changed over the years. This book will be enjoyed by anyone interested in mathematics and its history - and, in particular, by mathematics teachers at secondary, college, and university levels.

Proofs and Confirmations

Proofs and Confirmations PDF Author: David M. Bressoud
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316582752
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This is an introduction to recent developments in algebraic combinatorics and an illustration of how research in mathematics actually progresses. The author recounts the story of the search for and discovery of a proof of a formula conjectured in the late 1970s: the number of n x n alternating sign matrices, objects that generalize permutation matrices. While apparent that the conjecture must be true, the proof was elusive. Researchers became drawn to this problem, making connections to aspects of invariant theory, to symmetric functions, to hypergeometric and basic hypergeometric series, and, finally, to the six-vertex model of statistical mechanics. All these threads are brought together in Zeilberger's 1996 proof of the original conjecture. The book is accessible to anyone with a knowledge of linear algebra. Students will learn what mathematicians actually do in an interesting and new area of mathematics, and even researchers in combinatorics will find something new here.

The G. H. Hardy Reader

The G. H. Hardy Reader PDF Author: Donald J. Albers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107135559
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
G. H. Hardy ranks among the greatest twentieth-century mathematicians. This book introduces this extraordinary individual and his writing.