Math History

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a master of game theory, which is a fancy label for a simple idea: People compete, and they always do what they think is in their own best interest. Bueno de Mesquita uses game theory and its insights into human behavior to predict and even engineer political...

A breakout bestseller in Italy, now available for American listeners for the first time, Genesis: The Story of How Everything Began is a short, humanistic tour of the origins of the universe, earth, and life—drawing on the latest discoveries in physics to explain the seven most significant...

Starting with hands, abacus, and slide rule, humans have always reached for tools to simplify math. Pocket-sized calculators ushered in modern mathematics, helped build the atomic bomb, took us to the bottom of the ocean, and accompanied us to the moon. The pocket calculator changed our world, until it was supplanted by more modern devices that, in a cruel twist of irony, it helped to create. Keith Houston transports listeners from the nascent economies of the ancient world to World War II, and into the technological arms race that led to the first affordable electronic pocket calculators.

‘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...

Stephen Hawking has dazzled readers worldwide with a string of bestsellers exploring the mysteries of the universe. Now, for the first time, perhaps the most brilliant cosmologist of our age turns his gaze inward for a revealing look at his own life and intellectual evolution. My Brief...

Math rock sounds like blueprints look: exact, precise, architectural. This trance-like progressive metal music with indie rock and jazz influences has been captivating and challenging listeners for decades. Bands associated with the genre include King Crimson, Black Flag, Don Caballero, Slint, American Football, Toe, Elephant Gym, Covet, and thousands more. In an online age of bedroom producers and sampled beats and loops, math rock is music that is absolutely and resolutely played: men and woman in rooms with instruments creating chaos, beauty, and beautiful chaos.

From an award-winning University of Oxford professor comes a brilliant, urgent new look at prophecies—the predictions that determine our lives, from our personal finances and the quality of our healthcare to the news and social media we consume and the products foisted upon us. Today’s...

In March 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with ­million-dollar stakes. At the card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT. With him was Ken...

Kenneth is senior director of research and innovation at CoreAVI and chief technology officer at Squint AI. His work focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence and determinism, enabling neural networks to execute in safety critical systems. Kenneth has co-authored two articles in the scholarly journal Machine Learning with Applications and several white papers for different publications, including Embedded Computing Design. He also holds several patents under CoreAVI’s auspices.

An undocumented activist and a social scientist come together to tally of the structural costs of undocumented life An inhumane math pervades this country: even as our government extracts labor and often taxes from undocumented workers, it excludes these same workers from its social safety net...

The book Scripts and Songs on Science and Math 2 is a collection for school-age students that covers the variety of topics in science with the help of musical theatrical plays and material. They were created to help learn science by singing. It includes scripts about the creation of the periodic table of the chemical elements by Mendeleyev, the invention of the microscope by A. Leeuwenhoek in biology, the discovery of Newton’s Laws, developing Algebra, and other science-math topics. The songs and scripts speak to both the mind and heart.

Wielding his widely recognized powers of explanation, Paul Krugman lays bare the hidden facts behind the $2 trillion tax cut. With huge budget surpluses just ahead, the question of whether to cut taxes has shifted to when? and by how much? With Fuzzy Math, Paul Krugman dissects the Bush tax...

A pattern is a repeated design that is found everywhere in our world and even in outer space. All around you are both simple patterns and complicated patterns. The spiral of a seashell is very complex. But, there are patterns more complicated than a seashell. When did humans discover or invent patterns? There are cave paintings that are around 10,000 years old. They show hands in a pattern with 5 fingers.

Thanks to ancient Greece, we know more about philosophy, politics, the democratic system, mythology, art, the Olympics, and many, many lingual references imbedded in almost every European language. Ancient Greece has had a significant impact on many concepts we still hold true today.