Mathematics Audiobooks | Science & Technology

The Number Mysteries: A Mathematical Odyssey through Everyday Life

From the author of 'The Music of the Primes' and 'Finding Moonshine' comes a short, lively book on five mathematical problems that just refuse be solved - and on how many everyday problems can be solved by maths. Every time we download a song from Itunes, take a flight across the Atlantic or talk on our mobile phones, we are relying on great mathematical inventions. Maths may fail to provide answers to various of its own problems, but it can provide answers to problems that don't seem to be its own - how prime numbers are the key to Real Madrid's success, to secrets on the Internet and to the survival of insects in the forests of North America. In 'The Number Mysteries', Marcus du Sautoy explains how to fake a Jackson Pollock; how to work out whether or not the universe has a hole in the middle of it; how to make the world's roundest football. He shows us how to see shapes in four dimensions - and how maths makes you a better gambler. He tells us about the quest to predict the future - from the flight of asteroids to an impending storm, from bending a ball like Beckham to predicting population growth. It's a book to dip in to; a book to challenge and puzzle - and a book that gives us answers.

Marcus Du Sautoy (Author), James Bryce (Narrator)

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The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You

Work with data like a pro using this guide that breaks down how to organize, apply, and most importantly, understand what you are analyzing in order to become a true data ninja. From the stock market to genomics laboratories, census figures to marketing email blasts, we are awash with data. But as anyone who has ever opened up a spreadsheet packed with seemingly infinite lines of data knows, numbers aren't enough: we need to know how to make those numbers talk. In The Model Thinker, social scientist Scott E. Page shows us the mathematical, statistical, and computational models-from linear regression to random walks and far beyond-that can turn anyone into a genius. At the core of the book is Page's "many-model paradigm," which shows the reader how to apply multiple models to organize the data, leading to wiser choices, more accurate predictions, and more robust designs. The Model Thinker provides a toolkit for business people, students, scientists, pollsters, and bloggers to make them better, clearer thinkers, able to leverage data and information to their advantage.

Scott E. Page (Author), Jamie Renell (Narrator)

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The Milk-Pouring Boy and his Stray Feline Friends: A Playful Rhyming Journey of Counting Kitties fro

This charming, fun-filled children's book teaches kids how to count from 1 to 10. When a young boy discovers a hungry kitty in his backyard, he quickly springs into action, offering the kitty some milk. The next day, the boy is surprised to find that the kitty has returned, bringing a friend with it. As the days go by, more and more kitties show up, until the boy is surrounded by ten playful, hungry felines. With delightful rhyming text and adorable illustrations, 'Counting with Kitties' is sure to capture the hearts of young readers and inspire them to learn their numbers in a fun and engaging way.

The Sincere Seeker Kids Collection (Author), Erin S (Narrator)

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The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men: A Cultural History

Brought to you by Penguin. The complexity of mathematics - its abstract rules and obscure symbols - can seem very distant from the everyday. There are those things that are real and present, it is supposed, and then there are mathematical concepts: creations of our mind, mysterious tools for those unengaged with the world. Yet, from its most remote history and deepest purpose, mathematics has served not just as a way to understand and order, but also as a foundation for the reality it describes. In this elegant book, mathematician and philosopher Paolo Zellini offers a brief cultural and intellectual history of mathematics, ranging widely from the paradoxes of ancient Greece to the sacred altars of India, from Mesopotamian calculus to our own contemporary obsession with algorithms. Masterful and illuminating, The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men transforms our understanding of mathematical thinking, showing that it is inextricably linked with the philosophical and the religious as well as the mundane - and, indeed, with our own very human experience of the universe. © Paolo Zellini 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Paolo Zellini (Author), Mark Elstob (Narrator)

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The Mathematics of Love

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)

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The Mathematical Corporation: Where Machine Intelligence and Human Ingenuity Achieve the Impossible

The most powerful weapon in business today is the alliance between the mathematical smarts of machines and the imaginative human intellect of great leaders. Together they make the mathematical corporation, the business model of the future. We are at a once-in-a-decade breaking point similar to the quality revolution of the 1980s and the dawn of the internet age in the 1990s: leaders must transform how they run their organizations, or competitors will bring them crashing to earth--often overnight. Mathematical corporations--the organizations that will master the future--will outcompete high-flying rivals by merging the best of human ingenuity with machine intelligence. While smart machines are weapon number one for organizations, leaders are still the drivers of breakthroughs. Only they can ask crucial questions to capitalize on business opportunities newly discovered in oceans of data. This dynamic combination will make possible the fulfillment of missions that once seemed out of reach, even impossible to attain. Josh Sullivan and Angela Zutavern's extraordinary examples include the entrepreneur who upended preventive health care, the oceanographer who transformed fisheries management, and the pharmaceutical company that used algorithm-driven optimization to boost vaccine yields. **Contact Customer Service for Additional Material** Together they offer a profoundly optimistic vision for a dazzling new phase in business, and a playbook for how smart companies can manage the essential combination of human and machine.

Angela Zutavern, Josh Sullivan (Author), Fleet Cooper (Narrator)

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The Math Myth: And Other Stem Delusions

Andrew Hacker's 2012 New York Times op-ed questioning the requirement of advanced mathematics in our schools instantly became one of the paper's most widely circulated articles. Why, he wondered, do we inflict a full menu of mathematics on all young Americans, regardless of their interests or aptitudes? The Math Myth expands Hacker's scrutiny of many widely held assumptions, like the notions that mathematics broadens our minds and that the entire Common Core syllabus should be required of every student. He worries that a frenzied emphasis on STEM is diverting attention from other pursuits and subverting the spirit of the country. In fact, Hacker honors mathematics as a calling (he has been a professor of mathematics) and extols its glories and its goals. Yet he shows how mandating it for everyone prevents other talents from being developed and acts as an irrational barrier to graduation and careers. He proposes alternatives, including teaching facility with figures, quantitative reasoning, and understanding statistics.

Andrew Hacker (Author), Barry Press (Narrator)

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The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann

Brought to you by Penguin. An exhilarating new biography of John von Neumann: the lost genius who invented our world The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Self-replicating moon bases and nuclear weapons. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable man: John von Neumann. Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. His colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet - bar none. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory. He created the first ever programmable digital computer. He prophesied the potential of nanotechnology and, from his deathbed, expounded on the limits of brains and computers - and how they might be overcome. Taking us on an astonishing journey, Ananyo Bhattacharya explores how a combination of genius and unique historical circumstance allowed a single man to sweep through so many different fields of science, sparking revolutions wherever he went. Insightful and illuminating, The Man from the Future is a thrilling intellectual biography of the visionary thinker who shaped our century. 'A sparkling book, with an intoxicating mix of pen-portraits and grand historical narrative. Above all it fizzes with a dizzying mix of deliciously vital ideas. . . A staggering achievement' Tim Harford © Ananyo Bhattacharya 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Ananyo Bhattacharya (Author), Nicholas Camm (Narrator)

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The Life-Changing Magic of Numbers: How Maths Can Make Life Better

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Life-Changing Magic of Numbers, written and read by Bobby Seagull. If you found maths lessons at school irrelevant and boring, that's because you didn't have a teacher like Bobby Seagull. Long before his rise to cult fandom on University Challenge, Bobby Seagull was obsessed with numbers. They were the keys that unlocked the randomness of football results, the beauty of art and the best way to get things done. In his absorbing book, Bobby tells the story of his life through numbers and shows the incredible ways maths can make sense of the world around us. From magic shows to rap lyrics, from hobbies to outer space, from fitness to food - Bobby's infectious enthusiasm for numbers will change how you think about almost everything. Told through fascinating stories and insights from Bobby's life, and with head-scratching puzzles in every chapter, you'll never look at numbers the same way again.

Bobby Seagull (Author), Bobby Seagull (Narrator)

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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)

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The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

Many people take math in high school and promptly forget much of it. But math plays a part in all of our lives all of the time, whether we know it or not. In The Joy of x, Steven Strogatz expands on his hit New York Times series to explain the big ideas of math gently and clearly, with wit, and insight. Whether he is illuminating how often you should flip your mattress to get the maximum lifespan from it, explaining just how Google searches the internet, or determining how many people you should date before settling down, Strogatz shows how math connects to every aspect of life. Discussing pop culture, medicine, law, philosophy, art, and business, Strogatz is the math teacher you wish you'd had. Whether you aced integral calculus or aren't sure what an integer is, you'll find profound wisdom and persistent delight in The Joy of x.

Steven Strogatz (Author), Jonathan Yen (Narrator)

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The Joy of Pi

No number has captured the attention and imagination of people throughout the ages as much as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Pi-or ? as it is symbolically known-is infinite and, in The Joy of pi, it proves to be infinitely intriguing. With incisive historical insight and a refreshing sense of humor, David Blatner explores the many facets of pi and humankind's fascination with it-from the ancient Egyptians and Archimedes to Leonardo da Vinci and the modern-day Chudnovsky brothers, who have calculated pi to eight billion digits with a homemade supercomputer. The Joy of Pi is a book of many parts. Breezy narratives recount the history of pi and the quirky stories of those obsessed with it. Sidebars document fascinating pi trivia (including a segment from the 0. J. Simpson trial). Dozens of snippets and factoids reveal pi's remarkable impact over the centuries. Mnemonic devices teach how to memorize pi to many hundreds of digits (or more, if you're so inclined). Pi-inspired cartoons, poems, limericks, and jokes offer delightfully "square" pi humor. And, to satisfy even the most exacting of number jocks, the first one million digits of pi appear throughout the book. A tribute to all things pi, The Joy of pi is sure to foster a newfound affection and respect for the big number with the funny little symbol.

David Blatner (Author), Hank Jacobs, Laura Dean, Oliver Wyman (Narrator)

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Mathematics Audiobooks in Science & Technology