Strange Curves, Counting Rabbits, & Other Mathematical Explorations
eBook - ePub

Strange Curves, Counting Rabbits, & Other Mathematical Explorations

  1. 272 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Strange Curves, Counting Rabbits, & Other Mathematical Explorations

Book details
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

How does mathematics enable us to send pictures from space back to Earth? Where does the bell-shaped curve come from? Why do you need only 23 people in a room for a 50/50 chance of two of them sharing the same birthday? In Strange Curves, Counting Rabbits, and Other Mathematical Explorations, Keith Ball highlights how ideas, mostly from pure math, can answer these questions and many more. Drawing on areas of mathematics from probability theory, number theory, and geometry, he explores a wide range of concepts, some more light-hearted, others central to the development of the field and used daily by mathematicians, physicists, and engineers.
Each of the book's ten chapters begins by outlining key concepts and goes on to discuss, with the minimum of technical detail, the principles that underlie them. Each includes puzzles and problems of varying difficulty. While the chapters are self-contained, they also reveal the links between seemingly unrelated topics. For example, the problem of how to design codes for satellite communication gives rise to the same idea of uncertainty as the problem of screening blood samples for disease.
Accessible to anyone familiar with basic calculus, this book is a treasure trove of ideas that will entertain, amuse, and bemuse students, teachers, and math lovers of all ages.

Frequently asked questions

Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access Strange Curves, Counting Rabbits, & Other Mathematical Explorations by Keith Ball in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Matematica & Giochi in matematica. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Princeton University Press
Year
2011
ISBN
9781400841240
Topic
Matematica
Subtopic
Giochi in matematica

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Preface
  7. Acknowledgements
  8. Chapter One: Shannon’s Free Lunch
  9. Chapter Two: Counting Dots
  10. Chapter Three: Fermat’s Little Theorem and Infinite Decimals
  11. Chapter Four: Strange Curves
  12. Chapter Five: Shared Birthdays, Normal Bells
  13. Chapter Six: Stirling Works
  14. Chapter Seven: Spare Change, Pools of Blood
  15. Chapter Eight: Fibonacci’s Rabbits Revisited
  16. Chapter Nine: Chasing the Curve
  17. Chapter Ten: Rational and Irrational
  18. Index