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Last edited by Gustav-Landauer-Bibliothek Witten
August 10, 2020 | History
How math makes both science and the world tick. It reveals how seemingly arcane mathematical investigations and discoveries have led to bigger, more world-shaking insights into the nature of our world. It tells the stories of the mathematical thinkers who discerned some of the most fundamental aspects of our universe. Quantum Mechanics, space-time, chaos theory, and the workings of the complex systems, and the impossibility of a "perfect" democracy are all here. Friendly , entertaining and fun.
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Feynman, Einstein, Galois, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel (1906-1978), Arrow, Cantor, Hilbert, Cohen, Max Planck, Del Ferro, Cardano, Ferrari, Paolo Ruffini, Abel, LobachevskyShowing 1 featured edition. View all 1 editions?
Edition | Availability |
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1
How Math Explains the World: A Guide to the Power of Numbers, from Car Repair to Modern Physics
April 22, 2008, Collins
Hardcover
in English
- First Edition
0061241768 9780061241765
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Book Details
Table of Contents
Preface / ix
Introduction / xiii
Prologue: Why Your car Never Seems to be Ready When They Promised / 1
Section I: / Describing the Universe / 11
Section II: / The Incomplete Toolbox / 65
Section III: / Information: The Goldilocks Dilemma / 153
Section IV: / The Unattainable Utopia / 203
Index / 249
Edition Notes
Classifications
Contributors
The Physical Object
ID Numbers
Excerpts
three eye-opening results that demonstrated how there are limits to what we can know and do in the physical universe, limits to what truths we can discover using mathematical knowledge, and limits to what we can achieve in implementing democracy. ......Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle ....... Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem ......Kenneth Arrow showed that there is no method of tabulating votes that can satisfactorily translate the preferences of individual voters into the prefernces of the society to which those voters belong.
Page xv,
added by A.Soorianarayanan.
a surprising common element uniting these three results is that they are - well, surprising........ Each of these three results was an intellectual bombshell, exploding preconceptions held by many of the leading experts in their respective fields. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle would have astounded Laplace and the many other physicists who shared Laplace's deterministic vision of the universe... Social scientists had searched for the ideal method of voting even before the success of the American and French Revolutions, yet before he even finished graduate school, Arrow was able to show that this was an impossible goal.
Page xvii,
added by A.Soorianarayanan.
the three big results are discussed tracing the history of mathematics in a funny and entertaining way.
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Feedback?August 10, 2020 | Edited by Gustav-Landauer-Bibliothek Witten | person |
July 1, 2014 | Edited by A.Soorianarayanan | excerpts from the book |
July 1, 2014 | Edited by A.Soorianarayanan | table of contents, jacket design, pagination |
December 10, 2009 | Created by WorkBot | add works page |