The epic tale of an ancient, unsolved puzzle and how it relates to all scientific attempts to explain the basic structure of the universe At the dawn of science the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno form
What are the chances?! This exclamation greets the scarcely believable coincidence - you're picked up by the same taxi driver several years and thousands of miles apart or, in a second-hand bookshop f
Like Douglas HofstadterA's GAdel, Escher, Bach, and David BerlinskiA's A Tour of the Calculus, Euclid in the Rainforest combines the literary with the mathematical to explore logicA-the one indispen
While all of us regularly use basic math symbols such as those for plus, minus, and equals, few of us know that many of these symbols weren't available before the sixteenth century. What did mathemati
Many basic math symbols--such as those for plus and equals--were not available before the sixteenth century. What did mathematicians use before then? And how did mathematical notations evolve into wha
The fascinating story of an ancient riddleA-and what it reveals about the nature of time and space Three millennia ago, the Greek philosopher Zeno constructed a series of logical paradoxes to prove
"Mazur's book treats luck in a fresh light. The philosophy and emotional aspects (along with a little mathematics) are all there. The reader who delves in will be lucky indeed."---Persi Diaconis, Stan
A mathematical guide to understanding why life can seem to be one big coincidenceand why the odds of just about everything are better than we would think
Number is an eloquent, accessible tour de force that reveals how the concept of number evolved from prehistoric times through the twentieth century. Tobias Dantzig shows that the development of math
This is the question we ask ourselves when we encounter the strangest and most seemingly impossible coincidences, like winning the lottery four times or Lincoln's dreams foreshadowing his own assassin
This is the question we ask ourselves when we encounter the strangest and most seemingly impossible coincidences, like winning the lottery four times or Lincoln's dreams foreshadowing his own assassin
