Showing titles in Mathematics

In his groundbreaking book Predictably Irrational, social scientist Dan Ariely revealed the multiple biases that lead us into making unwise decisions. Now, in The Upside of Irrationality, he exposes the surprising negative and positive effects irrationality can have on our lives. Focusing on our behaviors at work and in relationships, he offers new insights and eye-opening truths about what really motivates us on the job.

This book reveals how statistics and probability are fundamental to our everyday lives—from advertisements to public opinion polls, weather forecasts to government policies, scientific research to stock market information. Haim Shapira then presents a myriad of anecdotes, riddles, case studies and practical exercises in his trademark witty voice to guide the listner through the importance of statistics and probability in everyday life.

We are often told that hard work is the key to success. But success isn’t about hard work - it’s about shortcuts. Shortcuts allow us to solve one problem quickly so that we can tackle an even bigger one. They make us capable of doing great things. And according to Marcus du Sautoy, math is the very art of the shortcut. Thinking Better is a celebration of how math lets us do more with less.

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, financial, and personal events. His forecasts, which have been employed by everyone from the CIA to major business firms, have an amazing 90 percent accuracy rate.

The insanely useful strategies presented here are clear and concise and taught with many hand examples that demonstrate profitable poker play. Sky will quiz your understanding throughout the book, and he’ll have you taking action on and off the felt with 55 different actions steps. This isn’t just a hear-it-and-shelve-it poker guide. This audiobook is your new poker coach; teaching you strategies and expecting you to use them. Then when you’re ready, repeating the process with the next valuable set of strategies.

Shakespeare's era was abuzz with mathematical progress, from the new concept of "zero" to Galileo's redraft of the heavens. Now, Rob Eastaway uncovers the many surprising ways math shaped Shakespeare's plays—and his world—touring astronomy, code-breaking, color theory, navigation, music, sports, and more.

To score a job in data science, machine learning, computer graphics, and cryptography, you need to bring strong math skills to the party. Math for Programmers teaches the math you need for these hot careers, concentrating on what you need to know as a developer. Filled with lots of helpful graphics and more than 200 exercises and mini-projects, this book unlocks the door to interesting - and lucrative! - careers in some of today’s hottest programming fields about the technology.

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Can a well-programmed machine do anything a human can - only better? Complex algorithms are buying our groceries, picking our partners, and driving our investments. They can navigate more data than a doctor or lawyer and act with greater precision. For many years we've taken solace in the notion that they can't create. But now that algorithms can learn and adapt, does the future of creativity belong to machines too?

In the middle ages, Christianity shared much with Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies. Listen to learn how Christian mystics came to the same conclusions as those from very different faiths. This edition has been adapted from the 1923 version into modern English to make the ideas more accessible to today's listener, the Cloud of Unknowing distills a complex mystical epistemology and discipline into engaging, understandable prose.

A vibrant account of how measurement has invisibly shaped our world, from ancient civilizations to the modern day.

Darrell Huff's celebrated classic How to Lie With Statistics is a straightforward and engaging guide to understanding the manipulation and misrepresentation of information that could be lurking behind every graph, chart, and infographic. Originally published in 1954, it remains as relevant and necessary as ever in our digital world, where information is king - and as easy to distort and manipulate as it is to access.

If you've ever sought a job or hired someone, applied to college or guided your child into a good kindergarten, asked someone out on a date or been asked out, you've participated in a kind of market. Most of the study of economics deals with commodity markets, where the price of a good connects sellers and buyers. But what about other kinds of "goods," like a spot in the Yale freshman class or a position at Google?

Michael Schneider leads us on a spectacular journey along the numbers one through 10 to explore the mathematical principles made visible in flowers, shells, crystals, plants, and the human body, expressed in the symbolic language of folk sayings and fairy tales, myth and religion, art and architecture. This is a new view of mathematics, not the one we learned at school but a comprehensive guide to the patterns that recur through the universe and underlie human affairs.

It's the ultimate in fantasy baseball: You get to pick the roster, set the lineup, and decide on strategies - with real players, in a real ballpark, in a real playoff race. That's what baseball analysts Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller got to do when an independent minor-league team in California, the Sonoma Stompers, offered them the chance to run its baseball operations according to the most advanced statistics.

For seven years, Paul Lockhart's A Mathematician's Lament enjoyed a samizdat-style popularity in the mathematics underground, before demand prompted its 2009 publication to even wider applause and debate. An impassioned critique of K-12 mathematics education, it outlined how we shortchange students by introducing them to math the wrong way. Here, Lockhart offers the positive side of the math education story by showing us how math should be done. Measurement offers a permanent solution to math phobia by introducing us to mathematics as an artful way of thinking and living.

Think you could be a theoretical physicist, but you need to brush up on your knowledge of relativity first? Want to carry a book on the subway that will make your fellow passengers think you’re totally sophisticated? Great! Then Quantum Physics for Beginners is the book for you.

Mathematics shapes almost everything we do. But despite its reputation as the study of fundamental truths, the stories we have been told about it are wrong—warped like the sixteenth-century map that enlarged Europe at the expense of Africa, Asia and the Americas. In The Secret Lives of Numbers, renowned math historian Kate Kitagawa and journalist Timothy Revell make the case that the history of math is infinitely deeper, broader, and richer than the narrative we think we know.

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.

Throughout history, scientists have come up with theories and ideas that just don't seem to make sense. These we call paradoxes. The paradoxes Al-Khalili offers are drawn chiefly from physics and astronomy and represent those that have stumped some of the finest minds. With elegant explanations that bring the listener inside the mind of those who've developed them, Al-Khalili helps us to see that, in fact, paradoxes can be solved if seen from the right angle.