| Description |
1 online resource (257 pages) : illustrations |
| Contents |
Introduction -- You can do maths -- Instant information -- Napier's nifty rules -- Sproutology -- Why don't clouds fall down? -- Picking oranges and stacking cannonballs -- Modelling epidemics -- A falling slinky -- A 'Mersennery' quest -- Shackleton's spectacular boat journey -- Where in the world? -- Srinivasa Ramanujan -- Sharing a pint -- Pons Asinorum -- Lost and found: the secrets of Archimedes -- Subterranean topology -- The Earth's vast orb -- More equal than others -- Maths and CAT scans -- Bayes rules OK -- Pythagoras goes global -- Dozenal digits: from dix to douze -- How leopards got their spots -- Monster symmetry and the forces of nature -- Kelvin wakes -- Gauss misses a trick -- Prime secrets revealed -- Amazing normal numbers -- Heavy metal or blue jeans? -- The school of Athens -- Hailstone numbers -- The remarkable BBP formula -- The atmospheric railway -- A hole through the Earth -- Sofia Kovalevskaya -- The simpler the better -- Geometry out of this world -- Euler's gem -- The watermelon puzzle -- The antikythera mechanism: the first computer -- World population -- Ireland's fractal coast -- Santa's fractal journey -- Interesting bores -- Pythagorean (or Babylonian) triples -- Bézout's theorem -- French curves and Bézier splines -- Astronomical perturbations -- The predictive power of maths -- Highway geometry -- Breaking weather records -- The Faraday of statistics -- The chaos game -- Fibonacci numbers are good for business -- Biscuits, books, coins and cards: severe hangovers -- Gauss's great triangle and the shape of space -- Degrees of infinity -- A swinging way to see the spinning globe -- Do you remember Venn? -- Mathematics is coming to life in a big way -- Temperamental tuning -- Cartoon curves -- How big was the bomb? -- Algebra in the Golden Age -- Old Octonians may rule the world -- Light weight -- Falling bodies -- Earth's shape and spin won't make you thin -- The tangled tale of knots -- Plateau's problem: soap bubbles and soap films -- The Steiner minimal tree problem -- Who wants to be a millionaire? -- The Klein 4-group -- Tracing our mathematical ancestry: the Mathematics Genealogy Project -- Café mathematics in Lvov -- The king of infinite space: Euclid and his Elements -- Golden moments -- Mode-S EHS: a novel source of weather data -- For good communications, leaky cables are best -- Tap-tap-tap the cosine button -- The Black-Scholes equation -- Eccentric pizza slices -- Mercator's marvellous map -- The remarkable power of symmetry -- Increasing abstract algebra -- Acoustic excellence and RT-60 -- The bridges of Paris -- Buffon was no buffoon -- James Joseph Sylvester -- Holbein's anamorphic skull -- The ubiquitous cycloid -- Hamming's smart error-correcting codes -- Mowing the lawn in spirals -- Melencolia I: an enigma for half a millennium -- Mathematics can solve crimes -- Life's a drag crisis -- The flight of a golf ball -- Factorial 52: a Stirling problem -- Richardson's fantastic forecast factory -- The analemmatic sundial |
| Summary |
An eclectic and humorous collection of 100 articles on the strange and unexpected ways mathematics shapes the world around us |
| Notes |
"The mathematical magic in everyday life"--Cover |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Print version record |
| Subject |
Mathematics -- Popular works
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Mathematics -- Miscellanea
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MATHEMATICS -- Essays.
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MATHEMATICS -- Pre-Calculus.
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MATHEMATICS -- Reference.
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Mathematics
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| Genre/Form |
Trivia and miscellanea
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Popular works
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| Form |
Electronic book
|
| ISBN |
9780717169566 |
|
0717169561 |
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