Weird Math: A Teenage Genius and His Teacher Reveal the Strange Connections Between Math and Everyday Life

ISBN-13: 9781541644786 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 320 str.

David Darling; Agnijo Banerjee

Opis

A successful science writer and a teenage math prodigy reveal the complex mathematics that is all around us
Almost everyone has stared at crumpled pages of a math homework assignment and wondered, where on Earth would you ever use it? It turns out, Earth is precisely the place. From the behavior of particles to the shape of the coast of England to the global weather system, complex mathematics surrounds us. And even if you don't think about it, your mind uses complex math every time you walk down the street or get ready for a slam dunk. Now, thanks to David Darling and the math prodigy Agnijo Banerjee, you can see just how awesome and exciting--even everyday--all that math you thought you'd never use can be.
In Weird Math, Darling and Banerjee reveal that mathematics--from the simplest to the most complex--are at the core of the world as we know it. As they discover, beneath the physical world lies an invisible framework of mathematics holding it up--fractals can be found in trees, continents, and economic markets; randomness pervades every facet of life, from the quantum level to the gamble that is day-to-day life; and the world can be structured in dimensions, including some unseen that only math can help conceive. If we dig deep enough in the world around us, all we're left with is not a bunch of material stuff but a ghostly and beautiful set of equations. Once Darling and Banerjee dig even deeper, they find that beneath every math question, even the most theoretical, lies a more profound reflection: questions about infinity become routes into deeper questions regarding the existence of free will and God. Probability leads us to the randomness at the heart of the physical universe. And the fractals that abound around us show how fantastically complex structures and patterns are generated from extremely simple rules. Math can help answer the world's most enduring questions, yielding surprising philosophical insight.
Packed with puzzles and paradoxes, mind-bending concepts and surprising solutions, Weird Math is an exploration of the mathematics at the center of our universe. It flirts with a tantalizing idea: what if everything that is mathematically true is represented somewhere, sometime, somehow in the reality in which we are embedded? What if math holds the formulae responsible for the form of the cosmos? Math's magical strangeness could hold the key to the world's most enduring mysteries.