Common Sense Mathematics is a text for a one semester college-level course in quantitative literacy. The text emphasizes common sense and common knowledge in approaching real problems through popular news items and finding useful mathematical tools and frames with which to address those questions. We asked ourselves what we hoped our students would remember about this course in ten year’s time. From that ten year perspective thoughts about syllabus–“what topics should we cover?"–seemed much too narrow. What matters more is our wish to change the way our students' minds work–the way they approach a problem, or, more generally, the way they approach the world. Most people “skip the numbers" in newspapers, magazines, on the web and (more importantly) even in financial information. We hope that in ten years our students will follow the news, confident in their ability to make sense of the numbers they find there and in their daily lives. Most quantitative reasoning texts are arranged by mathematical topics to be mastered. Since the mathematics is only a part of what we hope students learn, we've chosen another strategy. We look at real life stories that can be best understood with careful reading and a little mathematics.
This text uses the concepts usually taught in the first semester of a modern abstract algebra course to illuminate classical number theory: theorems on primitive roots, quadratic Diophantine equations, and more.
Ten years from now, what do you want or expect your students to remember from your course? We realized that in ten years what matters will be how students approach a problem using the tools they carry with them—common sense and common knowledge—not the particular mathematics we chose for the curriculum. Using our text, students work regularly with real data in moderately complex everyday contexts, using mathematics as a tool and common sense as a guide. The focus is on problems suggested by the news of the day and topics that matter to students, like inflation, credit card debt, and loans. We use search engines, calculators, and spreadsheet programs as tools to reduce drudgery, explore patterns, and get information. Technology is an integral part of today's world—this text helps students use it thoughtfully and wisely. This second edition contains revised chapters and additional sections, updated examples and exercises, and complete rewrites of critical material based on feedback from students and teachers who have used this text. Our focus remains the same: to help students to think carefully—and critically—about numerical information in everyday contexts.
This text uses the concepts usually taught in the first semester of a modern abstract algebra course to illuminate classical number theory: theorems on primitive roots, quadratic Diophantine equations, and more.
This book and CD set treats learning a programming language much like learning a spoken language: programming is best learned by immersion. Through building interesting programs and addressing real design issues much earlier than other texts, this book moves beyond the placement of semicolons and other syntactic details and is able to discuss the architecture of serious programs: how delegation and inheritance allow objects to cooperate to do useful work. Throughout the text, the authors deal with programs that implement applications realistic enough to be convincing.
This book treats learning a programming language much like learning a spoken language: programming is best learned by immersion. Through building interesting programs and addressing real design issues much earlier than other texts, this title moves beyond the mere syntax and discusses the serious architecture of programs: how delegation and inheritance allow objects to cooperate effectively. The text is filled with programs for realistic applications. These programs are much closer to those the student will encounter in the real world than those in traditional texts. Furthermore, the authors constantly revise the programs as they grow in sophistication so students learn another important aspect of real-world programming: that programs are constantly updated, modified and improved. Finally, in the exercises, the authors encourage students to write programs that interact with programs that they have prepared, and then ask them to write about those programs.
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