This insightful book combines the history, pedagogy, and popularization of algebra to present a unified discussion of the subject. Classical Algebra provides a complete and contemporary perspective on classical polynomial algebra through the exploration of how it was developed and how it exists today. With a focus on prominent areas such as the numerical solutions of equations, the systematic study of equations, and Galois theory, this book facilitates a thorough understanding of algebra and illustrates how the concepts of modern algebra originally developed from classical algebraic precursors. This book successfully ties together the disconnect between classical and modern algebraand provides readers with answers to many fascinating questions that typically go unexamined, including: What is algebra about? How did it arise? What uses does it have? How did it develop? What problems and issues have occurred in its history? How were these problems and issues resolved? The author answers these questions and more, shedding light on a rich history of the subject—from ancient and medieval times to the present. Structured as eleven "lessons" that are intended to give the reader further insight on classical algebra, each chapter contains thought-provoking problems and stimulating questions, for which complete answers are provided in an appendix. Complemented with a mixture of historical remarks and analyses of polynomial equations throughout, Classical Algebra: Its Nature, Origins, and Uses is an excellent book for mathematics courses at the undergraduate level. It also serves as a valuable resource to anyone with a general interest in mathematics.
This new edition brings the fascinating and intriguing history of mathematics to life The Second Edition of this internationally acclaimed text has been thoroughly revised, updated, and reorganized to give readers a fresh perspective on the evolution of mathematics. Written by one of the world's leading experts on the history of mathematics, the book details the key historical developments in the field, providing an understanding and appreciation of how mathematics influences today's science, art, music, literature, and society. In the first edition, each chapter was devoted to a single culture. This Second Edition is organized by subject matter: a general survey of mathematics in many cultures, arithmetic, geometry, algebra, analysis, and mathematical inference. This new organization enables students to focus on one complete topic and, at the same time, compare how different cultures approached each topic. Many new photographs and diagrams have been added to this edition to enhance the presentation. The text is divided into seven parts: The World of Mathematics and the Mathematics of the World, including the origin and prehistory of mathematics, cultural surveys, and women mathematicians Numbers, including counting, calculation, ancient number theory, and numbers and number theory in modern mathematics Color Plates, illustrating the impact of mathematics on civilizations from Egypt to Japan to Mexico to modern Europe Space, including measurement, Euclidean geometry, post-Euclidean geometry, and modern geometrics Algebra, including problems leading to algebra, equations and methods, and modern algebra Analysis, including the calculus, real, and complex analysis Mathematical Inference, including probability and statistics, and logic and set theory As readers progress through the text, they learn about the evolution of each topic, how different cultures devised their own solutions, and how these solutions enabled the cultures to develop and progress. In addition, readers will meet some of the greatest mathematicians of the ages, who helped lay the groundwork for today's science and technology. The book's lively approach makes it appropriate for anyone interested in learning how the field of mathematics came to be what it is today. It can also serve as a textbook for undergraduate or graduate-level courses. An Instructor's Manual presenting detailed solutions to all the problems in the book is available upon request from the Wiley editorial department.
Praise for the Second Edition "An amazing assemblage of worldwide contributions in mathematics and, in addition to use as a course book, a valuable resource . . . essential." —CHOICE This Third Edition of The History of Mathematics examines the elementary arithmetic, geometry, and algebra of numerous cultures, tracing their usage from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, India, China, and Japan all the way to Europe during the Medieval and Renaissance periods where calculus was developed. Aimed primarily at undergraduate students studying the history of mathematics for science, engineering, and secondary education, the book focuses on three main ideas: the facts of who, what, when, and where major advances in mathematics took place; the type of mathematics involved at the time; and the integration of this information into a coherent picture of the development of mathematics. In addition, the book features carefully designed problems that guide readers to a fuller understanding of the relevant mathematics and its social and historical context. Chapter-end exercises, numerous photographs, and a listing of related websites are also included for readers who wish to pursue a specialized topic in more depth. Additional features of The History of Mathematics, Third Edition include: Material arranged in a chronological and cultural context Specific parts of the history of mathematics presented as individual lessons New and revised exercises ranging between technical, factual, and integrative Individual PowerPoint presentations for each chapter and a bank of homework and test questions (in addition to the exercises in the book) An emphasis on geography, culture, and mathematics In addition to being an ideal coursebook for undergraduate students, the book also serves as a fascinating reference for mathematically inclined individuals who are interested in learning about the history of mathematics.
This book has three main goals. First, it explores a selection of topics from the early period of the theory of relativity, focusing on particular aspects that are interesting or unusual. These include the twin paradox relativistic mechanics and its interaction with Maxwell's laws the earliest triumphs of general relativity relating to the orbit of Mercury and the deflection of light passing near the sun and the surprising bizarre metric of Kurt Godel, in which time travel is possible. Second, it provides an exposition of the differential geometry needed to understand these topics on a level that is intended to be accessible to those with just two years of university-level mathematics as background. Third, it reflects on the historical development of the subject and its significance for our understanding of what reality is and how we can know about the physical universe. The book also takes note of historical prefigurations of relativity, such as Euler's 1744 result that a particle moving on a surface and subject to no tangential acceleration will move along a geodesic, and the work of Lorentz and Poincare on space-time coordinate transformations between two observers in motion at constant relative velocity. The book is aimed at advanced undergraduate mathematics, science, and engineering majors (and, of course, at any interested person who knows a little university-level mathematics). The reader is assumed to know the rudiments of advanced calculus, a few techniques for solving differential equations, some linear algebra, and basics of set theory and groups.
A guide to the handy kitchen appliance, plus a range of recipes, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning movie critic. In The Pot and How to Use It, Roger Ebert—Pulitzer Prize–winning film critic, admitted “competent cook,” and long-time electric rice cooker enthusiast—gives readers a charming, practical guide to this handy and often-overlooked kitchen appliance. While The Pot and How to Use It contains numerous and surprisingly varied recipes for electric rice cookers, it is much more than a cookbook. Originating from a blog entry on Roger’s popular Web site, the book also includes readers’ comments and recipes alongside Roger’s own discerning insights and observations on why and how we cook. With an introduction by vegetarian cookbook author Anna Thomas and expert assistance from recipe consultant and nutritionist Yvonne Nienstadt, The Pot and How to Use It is perfect for fans of Roger’s superb writing, as well as anyone looking to incorporate the convenience and versatility of electric rice cookers into his or her kitchen repertoire.
This book is an extensive survey and critical examination of the literature on the use of expert opinion in scientific inquiry and policy making. The elicitation, representation, and use of expert opinion is increasingly important for two reasons: advancing technology leads to more and more complex decision problems, and technologists are turning in greater numbers to "expert systems" and other similar artifacts of artificial intelligence. Cooke here considers how expert opinion is being used today, how an expert's uncertainty is or should be represented, how people do or should reason with uncertainty, how the quality and usefulness of expert opinion can be assessed, and how the views of several experts might be combined. He argues for the importance of developing practical models with a transparent mathematic foundation for the use of expert opinion in science, and presents three tested models, termed "classical," "Bayesian," and "psychological scaling." Detailed case studies illustrate how they can be applied to a diversity of real problems in engineering and planning.
This book has three main goals. First, it explores a selection of topics from the early period of the theory of relativity, focusing on particular aspects that are interesting or unusual. These include the twin paradox; relativistic mechanics and its interaction with Maxwell's laws; the earliest triumphs of general relativity relating to the orbit of Mercury and the deflection of light passing near the sun; and the surprising bizarre metric of Kurt Gödel, in which time travel is possible. Second, it provides an exposition of the differential geometry needed to understand these topics on a level that is intended to be accessible to those with just two years of university-level mathematics as background. Third, it reflects on the historical development of the subject and its significance for our understanding of what reality is and how we can know about the physical universe. The book also takes note of historical prefigurations of relativity, such as Euler's 1744 result that a particle moving on a surface and subject to no tangential acceleration will move along a geodesic, and the work of Lorentz and Poincaré on space-time coordinate transformations between two observers in motion at constant relative velocity. The book is aimed at advanced undergraduate mathematics, science, and engineering majors (and, of course, at any interested person who knows a little university-level mathematics). The reader is assumed to know the rudiments of advanced calculus, a few techniques for solving differential equations, some linear algebra, and basics of set theory and groups.
A valuable guide to understanding the problem of quantifying uncertainty in dose response relations for toxic substances In today's scientific research, there exists the need to address the topic of uncertainty as it pertains to dose response modeling. Uncertainty Modeling in Dose Response is the first book of its kind to implement and compare different methods for quantifying the uncertainty in the probability of response, as a function of dose. This volume gathers leading researchers in the field to properly address the issue while communicating concepts from diverse viewpoints and incorporating valuable insights. The result is a collection that reveals the properties, strengths, and weaknesses that exist in the various approaches to bench test problems. This book works with four bench test problems that were taken from real bioassay data for hazardous substances currently under study by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The use of actual data provides readers with information that is relevant and representative of the current work being done in the field. Leading contributors from the toxicology and risk assessment communities have applied their methods to quantify model uncertainty in dose response for each case by employing various approaches, including Benchmark Dose Software methods, probabilistic inversion with isotonic regression, nonparametric Bayesian modeling, and Bayesian model averaging. Each chapter is reviewed and critiqued from three professional points of view: risk analyst/regulator, statistician/mathematician, and toxicologist/epidemiologist. In addition, all methodologies are worked out in detail, allowing readers to replicate these analyses and gain a thorough understanding of the methods. Uncertainty Modeling in Dose Response is an excellent book for courses on risk analysis and biostatistics at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. It also serves as a valuable reference for risk assessment, toxicology, biostatistics, and environmental chemistry professionals who wish to expand their knowledge and expertise in statistical dose response modeling problems and approaches.
A middle-aged old sea dog finds the sailing schooner he has dreamed about, converts it from a cargo vessel to a beautiful passenger cruiser. He takes a number of guests on short cruises around the Gulf of Mexico, until he is approached for a circumnavigating cruise around the Gulf and the Caribbean. He, his first mate, and three couples encounter a variety of adventures, including an encounter with Columbian pirates. They barely escape, only to be chased by a hurricane up to the Yucatan peninsula, where they are forced to ground Lazy Daze in a river estuary. There they encounter two groups who turn out to be opposing forces, plus an ancient pirate treasure. The latter they load onto there boat with the help of one group whom they have befriended. When they salvaged and repaired Lazy Daze they attempted to leave the area. They were attacked by the other group, and after a battle for their lives, they barely make it away. From there they headed directly to the United States and a hospital to repair the damage done in the battle. There they had a number of more pleasant adventures. Book Review The Cruise of the Lazy Daze Review by William H.P. Smith The Lazy Daze is a good read, especially for an afternoon at the beach, a plane trip or a pleasant few hours in your favorite chair. This book by new novelist Roger Cooke will keep you reading long after you should have put it down to do other things you had planned. Cooke's clear, straight forward writing foregoes long descriptions with the major burden of moving the story along left to the characters themselves.  Cooke obviously has had ample sailing experience and those who love sailing ships will appreciate his expert command of the terms of boats and the sea. The story tells of a middle aged old sea dog who realizes a lifelong dream of owning a sailing ship and operating a charter cruising business. He finds a derelict old ship in a boat yard and rebuilds it into a beautiful ship with teak decks, brass fittings and tall white sails. He signs on a first mate and three couples for a cruise of Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.  But this cruise turns into a fast-moving story of heavy storms at sea, shipwreck on an island inhabited by two warring camps a native Mayan tribe and the descendents of French settlers. While on the island the discovery of a long buried pirates' treasure of gold adds to the experience. Telling more of the story would dampen your suspense, but there are many unexpected twists, turns and challenges before the sailors of the Lazy Daze return to home port. I recommend Lazy Daze. You can look forward to a suspenseful and enjoyable story.
This title is written for the numerate nonspecialist, and hopes to serve three purposes. First it gathers mathematical material from diverse but related fields of order statistics, records, extreme value theory, majorization, regular variation and subexponentiality. All of these are relevant for understanding fat tails, but they are not, to our knowledge, brought together in a single source for the target readership. Proofs that give insight are included, but for most fussy calculations the reader is referred to the excellent sources referenced in the text. Multivariate extremes are not treated. This allows us to present material spread over hundreds of pages in specialist texts in twenty pages. Chapter 5 develops new material on heavy tail diagnostics and gives more mathematical detail. Since variances and covariances may not exist for heavy tailed joint distributions, Chapter 6 reviews dependence concepts for certain classes of heavy tailed joint distributions, with a view to regressing heavy tailed variables. Second, it presents a new measure of obesity. The most popular definitions in terms of regular variation and subexponentiality invoke putative properties that hold at infinity, and this complicates any empirical estimate. Each definition captures some but not all of the intuitions associated with tail heaviness. Chapter 5 studies two candidate indices of tail heaviness based on the tendency of the mean excess plot to collapse as data are aggregated. The probability that the largest value is more than twice the second largest has intuitive appeal but its estimator has very poor accuracy. The Obesity index is defined for a positive random variable X as: Ob(X) = P (X1 +X4 > X2 +X3|X1 ≤ X2 ≤ X3 ≤ X4), Xi independent copies of X. For empirical distributions, obesity is defined by bootstrapping. This index reasonably captures intuitions of tail heaviness. Among its properties, if α > 1 then Ob(X) Ob(Xα). However, it does not completely mimic the tail index of regularly varying distributions, or the extreme value index. A Weibull distribution with shape 1/4 is more obese than a Pareto distribution with tail index 1, even though this Pareto has infinite mean and the Weibull’s moments are all finite. Chapter 5 explores properties of the Obesity index. Third and most important, we hope to convince the reader that fat tail phenomena pose real problems; they are really out there and they seriously challenge our usual ways of thinking about historical averages, outliers, trends, regression coefficients and confidence bounds among many other things. Data on flood insurance claims, crop loss claims, hospital discharge bills, precipitation and damages and fatalities from natural catastrophes drive this point home. While most fat tailed distributions are ”bad”, research in fat tails is one distribution whose tail will hopefully get fatter.
A young lady, born and raised in Dallas, inherits a 10,000 acre ranch, moves to the Texas Hill Country, and has many fun, and some not so fun , adventures, including a battle with a murderous neighbor. In the process, she hires an old friend, a civil engineer and aircraft pilot to help her get the goods on his land-grabbing activities. After resisting, and much bantering, Miss Willoughby falls in love with the pilot, and ends up trading half of her ranch to him for flying lessons, and a wedding ring. Together they keep the community in a turmoil until the neighborhood feud is settled.
This second English edition of a very popular two-volume work presents a thorough first course in analysis, leading from real numbers to such advanced topics as differential forms on manifolds; asymptotic methods; Fourier, Laplace, and Legendre transforms; elliptic functions; and distributions. Especially notable in this course are the clearly expressed orientation toward the natural sciences and the informal exploration of the essence and the roots of the basic concepts and theorems of calculus. Clarity of exposition is matched by a wealth of instructive exercises, problems, and fresh applications to areas seldom touched on in textbooks on real analysis. The main difference between the second and first English editions is the addition of a series of appendices to each volume. There are six of them in the first volume and five in the second. The subjects of these appendices are diverse. They are meant to be useful to both students (in mathematics and physics) and teachers, who may be motivated by different goals. Some of the appendices are surveys, both prospective and retrospective. The final survey establishes important conceptual connections between analysis and other parts of mathematics. This second volume presents classical analysis in its current form as part of a unified mathematics. It shows how analysis interacts with other modern fields of mathematics such as algebra, differential geometry, differential equations, complex analysis, and functional analysis. This book provides a firm foundation for advanced work in any of these directions.
Captain Cook & His Exploration of the Pacific follows the exciting discoveries made by Britain's most famous scientific navigator and his charting of the South Seas.
Mathematical models are used to simulate complex real-world phenomena in many areas of science and technology. Large complex models typically require inputs whose values are not known with certainty. Uncertainty analysis aims to quantify the overall uncertainty within a model, in order to support problem owners in model-based decision-making. In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in uncertainty analysis. Uncertainty and dependence elicitation, dependence modelling, model inference, efficient sampling, screening and sensitivity analysis, and probabilistic inversion are among the active research areas. This text provides both the mathematical foundations and practical applications in this rapidly expanding area, including: An up-to-date, comprehensive overview of the foundations and applications of uncertainty analysis. All the key topics, including uncertainty elicitation, dependence modelling, sensitivity analysis and probabilistic inversion. Numerous worked examples and applications. Workbook problems, enabling use for teaching. Software support for the examples, using UNICORN - a Windows-based uncertainty modelling package developed by the authors. A website featuring a version of the UNICORN software tailored specifically for the book, as well as computer programs and data sets to support the examples. Uncertainty Analysis with High Dimensional Dependence Modelling offers a comprehensive exploration of a new emerging field. It will prove an invaluable text for researches, practitioners and graduate students in areas ranging from statistics and engineering to reliability and environmetrics.
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