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They know something you don't know. They work inside investment banks, betting companies and social media giants. What are the secrets held by mathematicians and what can everyone else learn from them? Their advantage can be reduced to a small number of equations. Ten of them. An...d, surprisingly, it isn't their technical details that give them an edge. It is the way these equations allow them to view problems from a different angle -- a way of seeing the world that anyone can learn. In this eye-opening book, mathematician David Sumpter reveals the formulas that make the modern world go round, and how we can use them to better our chances of success, solidify friendships and live healthier lives, to guard against failure and financial ruin, and to see through scaremongering. Writing with clarity and wit, Sumpter explains how the same equations that are integral to Facebook can help you to work out how long to persist with a difficult task or how many episodes of a new Netflix series to watch before giving up. Empowering and enlightening, The Ten Equations shows how maths can truly change our way of understanding the world.
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The first is that the most common explanation for time - entropy - is flawed: firstly, because we have no way of explaining how the concentration of energy that would allow the Big Bang to take place came about, and secondly because none of our understanding of entropy takes into... account the fact that the universe is infinitely expanding.
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An entertaining exploration of the misuse of mathematics in our everyday lives that shows how we can combat the rising tide of misinformation.
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By Sumpter, David
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- RRP: $40.00
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They know something you don't know. They work inside investment banks, betting companies and social media giants. What are the secrets held by mathematicians and what can everyone else learn from them? Their advantage can be reduced to a small number of equations. Ten of them. An...d, surprisingly, it isn't their technical details that give them an edge. It is the way these equations allow them to view problems from a different angle -- a way of seeing the world that anyone can learn. In this eye-opening book, mathematician David Sumpter reveals the formulas that make the modern world go round, and how we can use them to better our chances of success, solidify friendships and live healthier lives, to guard against failure and financial ruin, and to see through scaremongering. Writing with clarity and wit, Sumpter explains how the same equations that are integral to Facebook can help you to work out how long to persist with a difficult task or how many episodes of a new Netflix series to watch before giving up. Empowering and enlightening, The Ten Equations shows how maths can truly change our way of understanding the world.
Read more
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'Deeply researched and profoundly absorbing . . . Matthew Stanley traces one of the greatest epics of scientific history . . . An amazing story' Michael Frayn, author of Tony Award-winning Copenhagen In 1916, Arthur Eddington, a war-weary British astronomer, opened a letter writt...en by an obscure German professor named Einstein. The neatly printed equations on the scrap of paper outlined his world-changing theory of general relativity. Until then Einstein's masterpiece of time and space had been trapped behind the physical and ideological lines of battle, unknown. Einstein's name is now synonymous with 'genius', but it was not an easy road. He spent a decade creating relativity and his ascent to global celebrity owed much to against-the-odds international collaboration, including Eddington's globe-spanning expedition of 1919 - two years before they finally met. We usually think of scientific discovery as a flash of individual inspiration, but here we see it is the result of hard work, gambles and wrong turns. Einstein's War is a celebration of what science can offer when bigotry and nationalism are defeated. Using previously unknown sources and written like a thriller, it shows relativity being built brick-by-brick in front of us, as it happened 100 years ago. 'Riveting . . . Stanley lets us share the excitement a hundred years later in this entertaining and gripping book. It's a must read if you ever wondered how Einstein became 'Einstein'' Manjit Kumar, author of Quantum
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The first is that the most common explanation for time - entropy - is flawed: firstly, because we have no way of explaining how the concentration of energy that would allow the Big Bang to take place came about, and secondly because none of our understanding of entropy takes into... account the fact that the universe is infinitely expanding.
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The Fractal Models book contains a series of hands-on activities designed to introduce and explore the concept of fractals to students and the interested individual. The companion volume, the Fractal Activity book provides some associated activities.
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A collection of puzzles. Covering a range of fields, from geography and environmental studies to map- and flag-making, it uses basic algebra and geometry to solve problems. It is suitable for readers interested in sharpening their thinking and mathematical skills.
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Topics include developments based on breakthroughs in the mathematical understanding of phenomena describing systems in highly inhomogeneous and disordered media, including the KPZ universality class (describing the evolution of interfaces in two dimensions), random walks in rand...om environment and percolative systems.
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Why do some ideas take off - and others fail to spread? Why are some diseases predictable, and others swamped in uncertainty? And what about the outbreaks that never happen at all? We live in a world that's more connected than ever before. But even as we see our lives being shape...d by the spread of ideas, trends - and even diseases - we sometimes struggle to grasp how it actually works. Outbreaks seem to be driven by randomness and hidden laws, and in order to understand them, we need to start thinking like mathematicians. Here, epidemiologist Adam Kucharski reveals how new mathematical approaches are transforming what we know about contagion - from the revolutionary initiatives that helped tackle gun violence in Chicago to the truth behind the spread of fake news. And along the way, he'll explain how happiness and depression can spread through our friendship networks, what STDs can tell us about banking, and why some predictions go badly wrong (and why that might not be a bad thing).
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