A fascinating, enchanting and painfully personal look at the meaning of luck, and the way in which it has shaped our shared history and continues to inflect our day to day lives.
What does it mean to be lucky? How might we mitigate the effects of bad luck and maximise those of good? Is there actually such a thing as ‘luck’—some force that intervenes between desire and its consummation, that impedes or hastens it?
To answer these questions, David Flusfeder sets out on a search for the definition of luck. This quest will take him to Siberia, Versailles, the Old Testament desert; play roulette in Baden-Baden with Dostoevsky; visit a Cambridge fairground with Wittgenstein; meet the sixteenth-century poet Thomas Bastard, who challenged Fortune, and lost; find Nietzsche on the slopes of Vesuvius; learn about the pioneers of probability; the twentieth-century art investigators of chance and possibility; and the intensely personal story of his father’s good fortune in escaping war-time Poland. Starting at the British Library in London, and following the dictates of an online randomiser that decided the chapter order, Flusfeder follows in the footsteps of some victors of luck and those who were defeated by it, from ancient times to the modern day.
Luck asks fundamental questions about the world, ourselves, our place in it. In these questions, about our relationships to fortune, to risk, to opportunity, to chance, destiny and fate, we find ourselves deciding who we are and how we might choose to live.
What if you had to take an art class in which you were only taught how to paint a fence? What if you were never shown the paintings of van Gogh and Picasso, weren't even told they existed? Alas, this is how math is taught, and so for most of us it becomes the intellectual equivalent of watching paint dry.
In Love and Math, renowned mathematician Edward Frenkel reveals a side of math we've never seen, suffused with all the beauty and elegance of a work of art. In this heartfelt and passionate book, Frenkel shows that mathematics, far from occupying a specialist niche, goes to the heart of all matter, uniting us across cultures, time, and space.
Love and Math tells two intertwined stories: of the wonders of mathematics and of one young man's journey learning and living it. Having braved a discriminatory educational system to become one of the twenty-first century's leading mathematicians, Frenkel now works on one of the biggest ideas to come out of math in the last 50 years: the Langlands Program. Considered by many to be a Grand Unified Theory of mathematics, the Langlands Program enables researchers to translate findings from one field to another so that they can solve problems, such as Fermat's last theorem, that had seemed intractable before.
At its core, Love and Math is a story about accessing a new way of thinking, which can enrich our lives and empower us to better understand the world and our place in it. It is an invitation to discover the magic hidden universe of mathematics.
A contrarian argues that modern physicists' obsession with beauty has given us wonderful math but bad science
Whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates popular theories from disposable ones. This is why, Sabine Hossenfelder argues, we have not seen a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for more than four decades. The belief in beauty has become so dogmatic that it now conflicts with scientific objectivity: observation has been unable to confirm mindboggling theories, like supersymmetry or grand unification, invented by physicists based on aesthetic criteria. Worse, these 'too good to not be true' theories are actually untestable and they have left the field in a cul-de-sac. To escape, physicists must rethink their methods. Only by embracing reality as it is can science discover the truth.
Logic is often perceived as having little to do with the rest of philosophy, and even less to do with real life. In this lively and accessible introduction, Graham Priest shows how wrong this conception is. He explores the philosophical roots of the subject, explaining how modern formal logic deals with issues ranging from the existence of God and the reality of time to paradoxes of probability and decision theory. Along the way, the basics of formal logic are explained in simple, non-technical terms, showing that logic is a powerful and exciting part of modern philosophy.
In this new edition Graham Priest expands his discussion to cover the subjects of algorithms, axioms, and proofs in mathematics.
This volume contains monologues and dialogues in which the most basic questions of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and logic are given clear and cogent answers.
Table of Contents:
30 Laws of Logic
Different Kinds of Mathematical Functions: A Dialogue
Functions, Bijections, and Mapping-relations
What is Logic?
Outline of a Theory of Knowledge
Determinism, Indeterminism, and Personal Freedom
A Dialogue
Neurosis vs. Psychosis
What determines whether one is happy?
Compulsive Work
Stuttering
How men and women are different
One learns from adversity, not from failure
Does everybody want money?
The #1 Rule of Writing
Lack of Coordination
Mental Illness: The Ultimate Litmus Test
The #1 Rule of Business
Honesty and Integrity
A Dialogue
Anger
A Dialogue
What is Bullshit?
A Short Treatise on Causality
Part 1: Causality and Continuity
Part 2 : Causation and Explanation
Part 3: Causation and Counterfactual Truth
Part 4: Program-causation
Part 5: The four different kinds of causes involved in the development of mental illness
Part 6: Singular Causation
Obsessions and Compulsions
A Dialogue concerning OCD
Writing Animated Dialogues as Self-Analysis:
A Dialogue
Neurotic Anxiety as Rational Fear:
A Dialogue
Agency
Analyticity
Anomalous Monism
Bullshit
Two Kinds of Insanity
Ignorance of the Future
Justice
Proof that Time-Travel is Impossible
Rationality vs. Intelligence: A Dialogue
The first major biography of the logician and mathematician whose incompleteness theorems helped launch a modern scientific revolution.
Nearly a hundred years after its publication, Kurt Gödel's famous proof that every mathematical system must contain propositions that are true-yet never provable-continues to unsettle mathematics, philosophy, and computer science. Yet unlike Einstein, with whom he formed a warm and abiding friendship, Gödel has long escaped all but the most casual scrutiny of his life.
An intimate portrait of the scientific and intellectual circles in prewar Vienna and a vivid re-creation of the early days of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, Journey to the Edge of Reason is the first biography to fully draw upon Gödel's voluminous letters and writings-including a never-before-transcribed shorthand diary of his most intimate thoughts-to explore his profound intellectual friendships, his moving relationship with his mother, his troubled yet devoted marriage, and the debilitating bouts of paranoia that ultimately took his life. It illuminates the mind-bending implications of Gödel's revolutionary ideas for philosophy, mathematics, artificial intelligence, and man's place in the cosmos.
Inside the making of the multibillion-dollar Grand Theft Auto videogame empire.
Grand Theft Auto is one of the biggest and most controversial videogame franchises of all time. Since its first release in 1997, GTA has pioneered the use of everything from 3D graphics to the voices of top Hollywood actors and repeatedly transformed the world of gaming. Despite its incredible innovations in the $75 billion game industry, it has also been a lightning rod of debate, spawning accusations of ethnic and sexual discrimination, glamorizing violence, and inciting real-life crimes. Jacked tells the turbulent and mostly unknown story of GTA's wildly ambitious creators, Rockstar Games, the invention and evolution of the franchise, and the cultural and political backlash it has provoked.
Written by David Kushner, author of Masters of Doom and a top journalist on gaming, this book is drawn from over ten years of interviews and research, including firsthand knowledge of Grand Theft Auto's creators and detractors. It explains how British prep school brothers Sam and Dan Houser took their dream of fame, fortune, and the glamor of American pop culture and transformed it into a worldwide videogame blockbuster. It also offers inside details on key episodes in the development of the series, including the financial turmoil of Rockstar games, the infamous "Hot Coffee" sex minigame incident, and more.
Whether you love Grand Theft Auto or hate it-or just want to understand the defining entertainment product of a generation-you'll want to read Jacked and get the real story behind this boundary-pushing game.
"A vigorous and often surprising narrative."-Wall Street Journal on Kushner's Levittown
'Fascinating ... so enlightening that suddenly maths doesn't seem so fearsome as it once did' SIMON WINCHESTER
From Aristotle to Ada Lovelace: a brief history of the mathematical ideas that have forever changed the world and the everyday people and pioneers behind them. The story of our best invention yet.
From our ability to calculate the passing of time to the algorithms that control computers and much else in our lives, numbers are everywhere. They are so indispensable that we forget how fundamental they are to our way of life.
In this international bestseller, Mickaël Launay mixes history and anecdotes from around the world to reveal how mathematics became pivotal to the story of humankind. It is a journey into numbers with Launay as a guide. In museums, monuments or train stations, he uses the objects around us to explain what art can reveal about geometry, how Babylonian scholars developed one of the first complex written languages, and how 'Arabic' numbers were adopted from India. It All Adds Up also tells the story of how mapping the trajectory of an eclipse has helped to trace the precise day of one of the oldest battles in history, how the course of the modern-day Greenwich Meridian was established, and why negative numbers were accepted just last century.
This book is a vital compendium of the great men and women of mathematics from Aristotle to Ada Lovelace, which demonstrates how mathematics shaped the written word and the world. With clarity, passion and wisdom, the author unveils the unexpected and at times serendipitous ways in which big mathematical ideas were created. Supporting the belief that - just like music or literature - maths should be accessible to everyone, Launay will inspire a new fondness for the numbers that surround us and the rich stories they contain.
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) achieved momentous breakthroughs in three areas: mathematics (the calculus), a theory of colors, and gravitational attraction. His first insights in each of these areas occurred during the "wonder years" of 1665-66, when retreat from the plague isolated Newton at Woolsthorpe. Newton's theory of "fluxions", along with independent work by Leibniz, created the methods of modern calculus. Building on the analytic geometry of Rene' Descartes, these techniques allow us to reason about the infinitely small and infinitely small and infinitely large in a mathematically rigorous way. Newton also revised Descartes' theory of light to show that white light is composed of different rays, each associated with a specific angle of refraction and a specific color. Newton also invented the reflection telescope, and considered his work on light to be his first great success. The famous theory of gravitation was built on the foundation of Galileo's laws of terrestrial motion and Kepler's laws of celestial motion. Newton described the inverse-square law of gravitation (F=1/r2); his famous Principia of 1686 included three famous laws: 1. Bodies continue in motion or at rest unless changed by a force. 2. Force equals mass times acceleration (F=ma). 3. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Newton also provided the universal law of gravitation (F=Gm, m2/r2) and showed that the gravitational force (the factor G in this equation) is constant for all bodies.
From ancient times to the present, scientists and philosophers have marveled at how the seemingly abstract discipline of mathematics could so perfectly explain the natural world. More than that-mathematics has often made predictions, for example, about subatomic particles or cosmic phenomena that were unknown at the time, but later were proven to be true. Is mathematics ultimately invented or discovered? And if, as Einstein insisted, mathematics is "a product of human thought that is independent of experience," how can it so accurately describe and even predict the world around us?
In Is God a Mathematician? astrophysicist and author Mario Livio brilliantly explores mathematical ideas from Pythagoras to the present day as he shows us how intriguing questions and ingenious answers have led to ever deeper insights into our world. This fascinating book will interest anyone curious about the human mind, the scientific world, and the relationship between them.
"Theologians have God, philosophers existence, and scientists mathematics. Mario Livio makes the case for how these three ideas might be related. . . . Livio's rich history gives the discussions human force and verve." -Sam Kean, New Scientist
Without calculus, we wouldn't have cell phones, TV, GPS, or ultrasound. We wouldn't have unraveled DNA or discovered Neptune or figured out how to put 5,000 songs in your pocket.
Though many of us were scared away from this essential, engrossing subject in high school and college, Steven Strogatz's brilliantly creative, down to earth history shows that calculus is not about complexity; it's about simplicity. It harnesses an unreal number-infinity-to tackle real world problems, breaking them down into easier ones and then reassembling the answers into solutions that feel miraculous.
Infinite Powers recounts how calculus tantalized and thrilled its inventors, starting with its first glimmers in ancient Greece and bringing us right up to the discovery of gravitational waves. Strogatz reveals how this form of math rose to the challenges of each age: how to determine the area of a circle with only sand and a stick; how to explain why Mars goes 'backwards' sometimes; how to turn the tide in the fight against AIDS.
As Strogatz proves, calculus is truly the language of the universe. By unveiling the principles of that language, Infinite Powers makes us marvel at the world anew.
