Mathematics Audiobooks | Science & Technology

In this must-have for anyone who wants to better understand their love life, a mathematician pulls back the curtain and reveals the hidden patterns-from dating sites to divorce, sex to marriage-behind the rituals of love.The roller coaster of romance is hard to quantify; defining how lovers might feel from a set of simple equations is impossible. But that doesn't mean that mathematics isn't a crucial tool for understanding love. Love, like most things in life, is full of patterns. And mathematics is ultimately the study of patterns-from predicting the weather to the fluctuations of the stock market, the movement of planets or the growth of cities. These patterns twist and turn and warp and evolve just as the rituals of love do. In The Mathematics of Love, Dr. Hannah Fry takes the listener on a fascinating journey through the patterns that define our love lives, applying mathematical formulas to the most common yet complex questions pertaining to love: What's the chance of finding love? What's the probability that it will last? How do online dating algorithms work, exactly? Can game theory help us decide who to approach in a bar? At what point in your dating life should you settle down? From evaluating the best strategies for online dating to defining the nebulous concept of beauty, Dr. Fry proves-with great insight, wit, and fun-that math is a surprisingly useful tool to negotiate the complicated, often baffling, sometimes infuriating, always interesting, mysteries of love.

Hannah Fry (Author), Hannah Fry (Narrator)

Audiobook

Dark Psychology 101: Learn The Secrets Of Covert Emotional Manipulation, Dark Persuasion, Undetected

Dark Psychology is one of the most powerful forces at work in the world today. It is used by the most powerful influencers the world has ever known. Those who are unaware of it risk having it used against them. Don’t run that risk! In his book entitled Dark Psychology 101 author Michael Pace offers a cutting-edge distillation of some of the most powerful principles in the world of dark psychology. Each chapter explains an aspect of dark psychology in a way which is understandable for a layman with no specialist scientific knowledge. Ideas are illustrated with examples to make the task of understanding dark psychology easier. In addition, the book contains case studies and useful profiles on the types of people who make use of this “black magic” in their everyday lives. You will be also shown how you can apply the principles of dark psychology if you choose to. Please be warned, this book is not for the faint of heart or the weak of mind. Once you have lifted the curtain on the world of dark psychology, there is no going back. You will have an understanding of human nature that few have ever obtained. With great power comes great responsibility.

Michael Pace (Author), Jim D. Johnston (Narrator)

Audiobook

A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)

Whether you are a student struggling to fulfill a math or science requirement, or you are embarking on a career change that requires a higher level of math competency, A Mind for Numbers offers the tools you need to get a better grasp of that intimidating but inescapable field. Engineering professor Barbara Oakley knows firsthand how it feels to struggle with math. She flunked her way through high school math and science courses, before enlisting in the army immediately after graduation. When she saw how her lack of mathematical and technical savvy severely limited her options-both to rise in the military and to explore other careers-she returned to school with a newfound determination to re-tool her brain to master the very subjects that had given her so much trouble throughout her entire life. In A Mind for Numbers, Dr. Oakley lets us in on the secrets to effectively learning math and science-secrets that even dedicated and successful students wish they'd known earlier. Contrary to popular belief, math requires creative, as well as analytical, thinking. Most people think that there's only one way to do a problem, when in actuality, there are often a number of different solutions-you just need the creativity to see them. For example, there are more than three hundred different known proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. In short, studying a problem in a laser-focused way until you reach a solution is not an effective way to learn math. Rather, it involves taking the time to step away from a problem and allow the more relaxed and creative part of the brain to take over. A Mind for Numbers shows us that we all have what it takes to excel in math, and learning it is not as painful as some might think!

Barbara Oakley (Author), Grover Gardner (Narrator)

Audiobook

Finding Zero: A Mathemetician’s Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers

The story of how we got our numbers—told through one mathematician’s journey to find zero The invention of numerals is perhaps the greatest abstraction the human mind has ever created. Virtually everything in our lives is digital, numerical, or quantified. The story of how and where we got these numerals, which we so depend on, has for thousands of years been shrouded in mystery. Finding Zero is an adventure-filled saga of Amir Aczel’s lifelong obsession: to find the original sources of our numerals. Aczel has doggedly crisscrossed the ancient world, scouring dusty, moldy texts, cross examining so-called scholars who offered wildly differing sets of facts, and ultimately penetrating deep into a Cambodian jungle to find a definitive proof. Here, he takes the reader along for the ride. The history begins with the early Babylonian cuneiform numbers, followed by the later Greek and Roman letter numerals. Then Aczel asks the key question: where do the numbers we use today, the so-called Hindu-Arabic numerals, come from? It is this search that leads him to explore uncharted territory, to go on a grand quest into India, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and ultimately into the wilds of Cambodia. There he is blown away to find the earliest zero—the keystone of our entire system of numbers—on a crumbling, vine-covered wall of a seventh-century temple adorned with eaten-away erotic sculptures. While on this odyssey, Aczel meets a host of fascinating characters: academics in search of truth, jungle trekkers looking for adventure, surprisingly honest politicians, shameless smugglers, and treacherous archaeological thieves—who finally reveal where our numbers come from. “Prolific mathematics writer Aczel leads a historical adventure that doubles as a surprisingly engaging math lesson…The story brims with local color, as well as insights into the history of mathematics and philosophy. Readers may find themselves questioning Aczel’s sanity, as his obsession with zero’s origins drives him from one dead end to the next, but it’s difficult to avoid being drawn into his quest with these rip-roaring exploits and escapades.”—Publishers Weekly

Amir D. Aczel (Author), Stefan Rudnicki (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve all our Problems... and Create More

A fascinating guided tour of the complex, fast-moving, and influential world of algorithms-what they are, why they're such powerful predictors of human behavior, and where they're headed next. Algorithms exert an extraordinary level of influence on our everyday lives - from dating websites and financial trading floors, through to online retailing and internet searches - Google's search algorithm is now a more closely guarded commercial secret than the recipe for Coca-Cola. Algorithms follow a series of instructions to solve a problem and will include a strategy to produce the best outcome possible from the options and permutations available. Used by scientists for many years and applied in a very specialized way they are now increasingly employed to process the vast amounts of data being generated, in investment banks, in the movie industry where they are used to predict success or failure at the box office and by social scientists and policy makers. What if everything in life could be reduced to a simple formula? What if numbers were able to tell us which partners we were best matched with - not just in terms of attractiveness, but for a long-term committed marriage? Or if they could say which films would be the biggest hits at the box office, and what changes could be made to those films to make them even more successful? Or even who is likely to commit certain crimes, and when? This may sound like the world of science fiction, but in fact it is just the tip of the iceberg in a world that is increasingly ruled by complex algorithms and neural networks. In The Formula, Luke Dormehl takes listeners inside the world of numbers, asking how we came to believe in the all-conquering power of algorithms; introducing the mathematicians, artificial intelligence experts and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are shaping this brave new world, and ultimately asking how we survive in an era where numbers can sometimes seem to create as many problems as they solve.

Luke Dormehl (Author), Daniel Weyman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things

How should human beings interact with technology in the future? That's a question entrepreneur and MIT Media Lab scientist David Rose grapples with every day. Many believe the future will look like more of the same--ever more smartphones, tablets and other devices, with screens embedded in every conceivable surface. Rose calls this narrow vision the "Terminal World", a future that makes some people comfortable, especially smartphone makers. Rose has a different view: a future in which technology is present in everyday objects we already care about and know how to use, objects that will respond to our needs, come to know us, and even learn to think ahead on our behalf. Such technology, Rose argues, can be woven in the background of our environment: enhancing our human relationships, not distracting us from them. Rather than being contained in a dizzying proliferation of apps and demanding that we succumb to its needs, technology will seem to us more like the enchanted technologies of fairy tales and fantasies, from the flying carpet to Harry Potter's invisibility cloak. The debate about new technology seems stuck between two polarizing views. On one hand, start-up entrepreneurs often trumpet the ability for technology to fix problems and make life more efficient. On the other side, critics skeptics bemoan that gadgets and screens are devaluing human relationships and traditional skills, sending humans on a dangerous path where the divisions between man and machine blur. In Enchanted Objects, David Rose offers a new perspective: an optimistic vision for the future that embraces a more natural way for humans to interact with technology--designs that will improve our lives in tangible ways. He points to a future that could, one day, even move mankind closer to fulfilling more deeply our essential desires for omniscience, immortality, protection, and creative expression.

David Rose (Author), Corey Brill (Narrator)

Audiobook

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

The Freakonomics of math-a math-world superstar unveils the hidden beauty and logic of the world and puts its power in our hands. The math we learn in school can seem like a dull set of rules, laid down by the ancients and not to be questioned. In How Not to Be Wrong, Jordan Ellenberg shows us how terribly limiting this view is: Math isn't confined to abstract incidents that never occur in real life, but rather touches everything we do-the whole world is shot through with it. Math allows us to see the hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of our world. It's a science of not being wrong, hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument. Armed with the tools of mathematics, we can see through to the true meaning of information we take for granted: How early should you get to the airport? What does "public opinion" really represent? Why do tall parents have shorter children? Who really won Florida in 2000? And how likely are you, really, to develop cancer? How Not to Be Wrong presents the surprising revelations behind all of these questions and many more, using the mathematician's method of analyzing life and exposing the hard-won insights of the academic community to the layman-minus the jargon. Ellenberg chases mathematical threads through a vast range of time and space, from the everyday to the cosmic, encountering, among other things, baseball, Reaganomics, daring lottery schemes, Voltaire, the replicability crisis in psychology, Italian Renaissance painting, artificial languages, the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the coming obesity apocalypse, Antonin Scalia's views on crime and punishment, the psychology of slime molds, what Facebook can and can't figure out about you, and the existence of God. Ellenberg pulls from history as well as from the latest theoretical developments to provide those not trained in math with the knowledge they need. Math, as Ellenberg says, is "an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength." With the tools of mathematics in hand, you can understand the world in a deeper, more meaningful way. How Not to Be Wrong will show you how.

Jordan Ellenberg (Author), Jordan Ellenberg (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World

A tour of the world's most amazing acoustic phenomena that reveals how sound works in everyday life. Trevor Cox is on a hunt for the sonic wonders of the world. A renowned expert who engineers classrooms and concert halls, Cox has made a career of eradicating bizarre and unwanted sounds. But after an epiphany in the London sewers, Cox now revels in exotic noises—creaking glaciers, whispering galleries, stalactite organs, musical roads, humming dunes, seals that sound like alien angels, and a Mayan pyramid that chirps like a bird. With forays into archaeology, neuroscience, biology, and design, Cox explains how sound is made and altered by the environment, how our body reacts to peculiar noises, and how these mysterious wonders illuminate sound's surprising dynamics in everyday settings—from your bedroom to the opera house. The Sound Book encourages us to become better listeners in a world dominated by the visual and to open our ears to the glorious cacophony all around us.

Trevor Cox (Author), Jonathan Cowley (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch

From Lewis Dartnell, a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world as well as a thought experiment about the very idea of scientific knowledge itself. How would you go about rebuilding a technological society from scratch? If our technological society collapsed tomorrow, perhaps from a viral pandemic or catastrophic asteroid impact, what would be the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors? What crucial knowledge would they need to survive in the immediate aftermath and to rebuild civilization as quickly as possible—a guide for rebooting the world? Human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population. It has built on itself for centuries, becoming vast and increasingly specialized. Most of us are ignorant about the fundamental principles of the civilization that supports us, happily utilizing the latest—or even the most basic—technology without having the slightest idea of why it works or how it came to be. If you had to go back to absolute basics, like some sort of postcataclysmic Robinson Crusoe, would you know how to re-create an internal combustion engine, put together a microscope, get metals out of rock, accurately tell time, weave fibers into clothing, or even how to produce food for yourself? Regarded as one of the brightest young scientists of his generation, Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. Every piece of technology rests on an enormous support network of other technologies, all interlinked and mutually dependent. You can't hope to build a radio, for example, without understanding how to acquire the raw materials it requires, as well as generate the electricity needed to run it. But Dartnell doesn't just provide specific information for starting over; he also reveals the greatest invention of them all—the phenomenal knowledge-generating machine that is the scientific method itself. This would allow survivors to learn technological advances not explicitly explored in The Knowledge as well as things we have yet to discover. The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world as well as a thought experiment about the very idea of scientific knowledge itself.

Lewis Dartnell (Author), John Lee (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve all our Problems ... and Create More

What if everything in life could be reduced to a simple formula? What if numbers were able to tell us which partners we were best matched with - not just in terms of attractiveness, but for a long-term committed marriage? Or if they could say which films would be the biggest hits at the box office, and what changes could be made to those films to make them even more successful? Or even who out of us is likely to commit certain crimes, and when? This may sound like the world of science-fiction, but in fact it is just the tip of the iceberg in a world that is increasingly ruled by complex algorithms and neural networks. In The Formula, Luke Dormehl takes you inside the world of numbers, asking how we came to believe in the all-conquering power of algorithms; introducing the mathematicians, artificial intelligence experts and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are shaping this brave new world, and ultimately asking how we survive in an era where numbers can sometimes seem to create as many problems as they solve.

Luke Dormehl (Author), Daniel Weyman (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Power of Forgetting: Six Essential Skills to Clear Out Brain Clutter and Become the Sharpest, Sm

An uncommon guide for accomplishing more every day by engaging the unique skill of forgetting, from the creator of the award-winning memory training system Brainetics Is it possible that the answer to becoming a more efficient and effective thinker is learning how to forget? Yes! Mike Byster will show you how mastering this extraordinary technique—forgetting unnecessary information, sifting through brain clutter, and focusing on only important nuggets of data—will change the quality of your work and life balance forever. Using the six tools in The Power of Forgetting, you’ll learn how to be a more agile thinker and productive individual. You will overcome the staggering volume of daily distractions that lead to to brain fog, an inability to concentrate, lack of creativity, stress, anxiety, nervousness, angst, worry, dread, and even depression. By training your brain with Byster’s exclusive quizzes and games, you’ll develop the critical skills to become more successful in all that you do, each and every day. ***Please contact Member Services for additional documents***

Mike Byster (Author), Mark Deakins (Narrator)

Audiobook

Game-Changer: Game Theory and the Art of Transforming Strategic Situations

A radically new, and easily learned, way to outstrategize your rivals. "The wise win before they fight, while the ignorant fight to win." So wrote Zhuge Liang, the great Chinese military strategist. He was referring to battlefield tactics, but the same can be said about any strategic situation. Even seemingly certain defeat can be turned into victory-whether in battle, business, or life-by those with the strategic vision to recognize how to "change the game" to their own advantage. The aim of David McAdams's Game-Changer is nothing less than to empower you with this wisdom-not just to win in every strategic situation (or "game") you face but to change those games and the ecosystems in which they reside to transform your life and our lives together for the better. Game-Changer develops six basic ways to change games-commitment, regulation, cartelization, retaliation, trust, and relationships-enlivened by countless colorful characters and unforgettable examples from the worlds of business, medicine, finance, military history, crime, sports, and more. The audiobook then digs into several real-world strategic challenges, such as how to keep prices low on the Internet, how to restore the public's lost trust in for-charity telemarketers, and even how to save mankind from looming and seemingly unstoppable drug-resistant disease. In each case, McAdams uses the game-theory approach developed in the audiobook to identify the strategic crux of the problem and then leverages that "game-awareness" to brainstorm ways to change the game to solve or at least mitigate the underlying problem. So get ready for a fascinating journey. You'll emerge a deeper strategic thinker, poised to change and win all the games you play. In doing so, you can also make the world a better place. "Just one Game-Changer [is] enough to seed and transform an entire organization into a more productive, happier, and altogether better place," McAdams writes. Just imagine what we can do together.

David McAdams (Author), David Mcadams, Grover Gardner (Narrator)

Audiobook

Mathematics Audiobooks in Science & Technology