By Brian Hayes
Brian Hayes is likely one of the so much comprehensive essayists lively today--a declare supported not just via his prolific and carrying on with fine quality output but in addition through such honors because the nationwide journal Award for his commemorative Y2K essay titled "Clock of Ages," released within the November/December 1999 factor of The Sciences magazine. (The also-rans that 12 months incorporated Tom Wolfe, Verlyn Klinkenborg, and Oliver Sacks.) Hayes's paintings during this style has additionally seemed in such anthologies as The Best American journal Writing, the easiest American technological know-how and Nature Writing, and The Norton Reader. right here he deals us a range of his such a lot memorable and available pieces--including "Clock of Ages"--embellishing them with an total, scene-setting preface, reconfigured illustrations, and a refreshingly self-critical "Afterthoughts" part appended to every essay.
Read or Download Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions PDF
Similar mathematical physics books
Practical applied mathematics: modelling, analysis, approximation
Drawing from an exhaustive number of mathematical topics, together with genuine and complicated research, fluid mechanics and asymptotics, this booklet demonstrates how arithmetic could be intelligently utilized in the particular context to a variety of commercial makes use of. the amount is directed to undergraduate and graduate scholars.
Kalman filtering with real-time applications
This publication provides a radical dialogue of the mathematical idea of Kalman filtering. The filtering equations are derived in a chain of user-friendly steps allowing the optimality of the method to be understood. It offers a finished remedy of assorted significant subject matters in Kalman-filtering idea, together with uncorrelated and correlated noise, coloured noise, steady-state conception, nonlinear structures, structures id, numerical algorithms, and real-time purposes.
Flatland is a special, pleasant satire that has charmed readers for over a century. released in 1884 by means of the English clergyman and headmaster Edwin A. Abbott, it's the fanciful story of A. sq., a two-dimensional being who's whisked away by means of a mysterious customer to The Land of 3 Dimensions, an adventure that ceaselessly alters his worldview.
Fractal-Based Methods in Analysis
The belief of modeling the behaviour of phenomena at a number of scales has develop into a great tool in either natural and utilized arithmetic. Fractal-based options lie on the center of this quarter, as fractals are inherently multiscale items; they quite often describe nonlinear phenomena larger than conventional mathematical types.
- Theoretische Physik 1. Klassische Mechanik
- Hypocoercivity
- Handbook of Chaos Control
- An introduction to the theory of distributions
- Mathematical Methods for Engineers and Scientists 1: Complex Analysis, Determinants and Matrices
Extra resources for Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions
Example text
The crucial role of the seed was made clear in the 1980s by Manuel Blum, now of Carnegie Mellon University. He pointed out that a pseudorandom generator does not actually generate any randomness; it stretches or dilutes whatever randomness is present in the seed, spreading it out over a longer series of numbers like a drop of pigment mixed into a gallon of paint. For most purposes, pseudorandom numbers serve perfectly well. Almost all Monte Carlo work is based on them. Even for some cryptographic applications—where standards are higher and unpredictability is everything—Blum and others have invented pseudorandom generators that meet most needs.
The topics included here range from deadly serious (war and peace, wealth and poverty) to utterly frivolous (the mathematics of mattress flipping). Two of the pieces look back to earlier eras when computers were built out of brass gears instead of silicon chips. One essay describes imaginary genetic codes that seem far more elegant (to my taste, anyway) than nature’s own scheme for interpreting DNA. Yet another chapter takes up the surprisingly tricky question of what it means for two things to be equal.
In reciting this history of shifting hazards, I don’t mean to belittle any of them; they are all to be taken seriously. I simply want to point out that when we make an earnest effort to think about “the long run,” our vision of the distant future always seems to reflect mainly the concerns of the present moment. Trying to make life a little better for the great-great- . . great-grandkids is a worthy goal; conversely, policies that cater solely to our own comfort and convenience, ignoring the welfare of future generations, are reprehensible.