Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Best Writing on Mathematics 2018
    The Best Writing on Mathematics 2018
    The Best Writing on Mathematics 2018
    Ebook286 pages5 hours

    The Best Writing on Mathematics 2018

    By Mircea Pitici

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The year’s finest mathematical writing from around the world

    This annual anthology brings together the year’s finest mathematics writing from around the world. Featuring promising new voices alongside some of the foremost names in the field, The Best Writing on Mathematics 2018 makes available to a wide audience many pieces not easily found anywhere else—and you don’t need to be a mathematician to enjoy them. These essays delve into the history, philosophy, teaching, and everyday aspects of math, offering surprising insights into its nature, meaning, and practice—and taking readers behind the scenes of today’s hottest mathematical debates.

    James Grime shows how to build subtly mischievous dice for playing slightly unfair games and Michael Barany traces how our appreciation of the societal importance of mathematics has developed since World War II. In other essays, Francis Su extolls the inherent values of learning, doing, and sharing mathematics, and Margaret Wertheim takes us on a mathematical exploration of the mind and the world—with glimpses at science, philosophy, music, art, and even crocheting. And there’s much, much more.

    In addition to presenting the year’s most memorable math writing, this must-have anthology includes an introduction by the editor and a bibliography of other notable pieces on mathematics.

    This is a must-read for anyone interested in where math has taken us—and where it is headed.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateDec 4, 2018
    ISBN9780691188720
    The Best Writing on Mathematics 2018

    Related to The Best Writing on Mathematics 2018

    Titles in the series (11)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Mathematics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Twin Prime Hero: Rags, riches, and fame in mathematics.

      Dec 29, 2016

      Yitang “Tom” Zhang spent the seven years following the completion of his Ph.D. in mathematics floating between Kentucky and Queens, working for a chain of Subway restaurants, and doing odd accounting work. Now he is on a lecture tour that includes st

      8 min read

    • Article

      Math’s Beautiful Monsters: How a destructive idea paved the way for modern math.

      Apr 3, 2014

      Much like its creator, Karl Weierstrass’ monster came from nowhere. After four years at university spent drinking and fencing, Weierstrass had left empty handed. He eventually took a teaching course and spent most of the 1850s as a schoolteacher in B

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Math That Takes Newton Into the Quantum World

      Feb 28, 2019

      In my 50s, too old to become a real expert, I have finally fallen in love with algebraic geometry. As the name suggests, this is the study of geometry using algebra. Around 1637, René Descartes laid the groundwork for this subject by taking a plane,

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Aesthetic Beauty of Math

      Jul 22, 2019

      The Aesthetic Beauty of Math
      5 min read

    • Article

      Math’s Beautiful Monsters

      Oct 26, 2017

      Much like its creator, Karl Weierstrass’ monster came from nowhere. After four years at university spent drinking and fencing, Weierstrass had left empty handed. He eventually took a teaching course and spent most of the 1850s as a schoolteacher in B

      10 min read

    • Article

      In Mathematics, Mistakes Aren’t What They Used To Be: Computers can’t invent, but they’re changing the field anyway.

      May 7, 2015

      Vladimir Voevodsky had no sooner sat himself down at the sparkling table, set for a dinner party at the illustrious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, than he overturned his empty wine glass, flipping bowl over stem and standing t

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Deepest Uncertainty: When a hypothesis is neither true nor false.

      Jun 6, 2013

      Georg Cantor died in 1918 in a sanatorium in Halle, Germany. A pre-eminent mathematician, he had laid the foundation for the theory of infinite numbers in the 1870s. At the time, his ideas received hostile opposition from prominent mathematicians in

      4 min read

    • Article

      Kolmogorov Complexity and Our Search for Meaning

      Aug 2, 2018

      Was it a chance encounter when you met that special someone or was there some deeper reason for it? What about that strange dream last night—was that just the random ramblings of the synapses of your brain or did it reveal something deep about your u

      8 min read

    • Article

      Why Mathematicians Should Stop Naming Things After Each Other

      Sep 2, 2020

      Any student of modern math must know what it feels like to drown in a well of telescoping terminology. For a high-profile example, let’s take the Calabi-Yau manifold, made famous by string theory. A Calabi-Yau manifold is a compact, complex Kähler ma

      6 min read

    • Article

      Physicists Attack Math’s $1,000,000 Question

      Apr 4, 2017

      Physicists are attempting to map the distribution of the prime numbers to the energy levels of a particular quantum system.

      4 min read

    • Article

      How to Solve the Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever: A step-by-step guide to True, False, and Random.

      Nov 5, 2015

      While a doctoral student at Princeton University in 1957, studying under a founder of theoretical computer science, Raymond Smullyan would occasionally visit New York City. On one of these visits, he met a “very charming lady musician” and, on their

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Man Who Invented Modern Probability: Chance encounters in the life of Andrei Kolmogorov.

      Oct 16, 2013

      If two statisticians were to lose each other in an infinite forest, the first thing they would do is get drunk. That way, they would walk more or less randomly, which would give them the best chance of finding each other. However, the statisticians s

      9 min read

    • Article

      Math After COVID-19

      Apr 28, 2020

      Math After COVID-19
      4 min read

    • Article

      Claude Shannon, the Las Vegas Shark

      Jul 27, 2017

      Many of Claude Shannon’s off-the-clock creations were whimsical—a machine that made sarcastic remarks, for instance, or the Roman numeral calculator. Others created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and father of information theo

      5 min read

    • Article

      How to Build a Search Engine for Mathematics: The Surprising Power of Neil Sloane’s Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.: The surprising power of Neil Sloane’s Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

      Oct 22, 2015

      On the average summer Saturday, the mathematician Neil Sloane woke up to a crisis. “There are always crises,” he said— albeit crises of the teapot tempest variety. One Saturday over breakfast, he faced an inbox message titled “edits from outer space.

      10 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Best Writing on Mathematics 2018

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Best Writing on Mathematics 2018 - Mircea Pitici

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1