Product Description: Alexander Masters tripped over his first book subject on a Cambridge sidewalk, and the result was the multi-award-winning bestseller Stuart: A Life Backwards. His second, he’s found under his floorboards.   One of the greatest mathematical prodigies of the twentieth century, Simon Norton stomps around Alexander’s basement in semidarkness, dodging between stalagmites of bus timetables and engorged plastic bags, eating tinned kippers stirred into packets of Bombay mix...read more

Product Description: A fascinating memoir from the man who revitalized visual geometry, and whose ideas about fractals have changed how we look at both the natural world and the financial world.Benoit Mandelbrot, the creator of fractal geometry, has significantly improved our understanding of, among other things, financial variability and biological rhythms...read more

Product Description: A Mathematician's Apology is the famous essay by British mathematician G. H. Hardy. It concerns the aesthetics of mathematics with some personal content, and gives the layman an insight into the mind of a working mathematician. Indeed, this book is often considered one of the best insights into the mind of a working mathematician written for the layman...read more

Relates how mathematical genius John Forbes Nash, jr., suffered a breakdown at age thirty-one and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but experienced a remission of his illness thirty years later

Product Description: This volume contains the papers published by A. Borel from 1983 to 1999. About half of them are research papers, written singly or in collaboration, on various topics pertaining mainly to algebraic or Lie groups, homogeneous spaces, arithmetic groups (L2-spectrum, automorphic forms, cohomology and covolumes), L2-cohomology of symmetric or locally symmetric spaces, and to the Oppenheim conjecture...read more

Product Description: Sophus Lie (1842-1899) is one of Norways greatest scientific talents. His mathematical works have made him famous around the world no less than Niels Henrik Abel. The terms "Lie groups" and "Lie algebra" are part of the standard mathematical vocabulary...read more

Among the myriad of constants that appear in mathematics, p, e, and i are the most familiar. Following closely behind is g, or gamma, a constant that arises in many mathematical areas yet maintains a profound sense of mystery.In a tantalizing blend of history and mathematics, Julian Havil takes the reader on a journey through logarithms and the harmonic series, the two defining elements of gamma, toward the first account of gamma's place in mathematics.Introduced by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), who figures prominently in this book, gamma is defined as the limit of the sum of 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + . . . up to 1/n, minus the natural logarithm of n--the numerical value being 0.5772156. . .. But unlike its more celebrated colleagues p and e, the exact nature of gamma remains a mystery--we don't even know if gamma can be expressed as a fraction.Among the numerous topics that arise during this historical odyssey into fundamental mathematical ideas are the Prime Number Theorem and the most important open problem in mathematics today--the Riemann Hypothesis (though no proof of either is offered!).Sure to be popular with not only students and instructors but all math aficionados, Gamma takes us through countries, centuries, lives, and works, unfolding along the way the stories of some remarkable mathematics from some remarkable mathematicians.

Product Description: A gripping and tragic tale that sheds rare light on the unique burden of genius   In 2006, an eccentric Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman solved the Poincare Conjecture, an extremely complex topological problem that had eluded the best minds for over a century...read more

Product Description: Mathematicians is a remarkable collection of ninety-two photographic portraits, featuring some of the most amazing mathematicians of our time. Acclaimed photographer Mariana Cook captures the exuberant and colorful personalities of these brilliant thinkers and the superb images are accompanied by brief autobiographical texts written by each mathematician...read more

Product Description: This collection features six of the most recent works by George E.P. Box. Topics include time series analysis, response surfaces, mixtures and ridge analyses and Statistics for experimenters.

Product Description: This volume offers a unique collection of outstanding contributions from renowned women mathematicians who met in Cambridge for a conference under the auspices of European Women in Mathematics (EWM). These contributions serve as excellent surveys of their subject areas, including symplectic topology, combinatorics and number theory...read more

Product Description: Symmetry is all around us. Of fundamental significance to the way we interpret the world, this unique, pervasive phenomenon indicates a dynamic relationship between objects. Combining a rich historical narrative with his own personal journey as a mathematician, Marcus du Sautoy takes a unique look into the mathematical mind as he explores deep conjectures about symmetry and brings us face-to-face with the oddball mathematicians, both past and present, who have battled to understand symmetry's elusive qualities...read more

Product Description: Oscar Zariski’s work in mathematics permanently altered the foundations of algebraic geometry. The powerful tools he forged from the ideas of modern algebra allowed him to penetrate classical problems with an unaccustomed depth, and brought new rigor to the intuitive proofs of the Italian School...read more

Product Description: Mathieu Marion offers a careful, historically informed study of Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics. This area of his work has frequently been undervalued by Wittgenstein specialists and by philosophers of mathematics alike; but the surprising fact that he wrote more on this subject than on any other indicates its centrality in his thought...read more

Product Description: This significantly expanded second edition of Riemann, Topology, and Physics combines a fascinating account of the life and work of Bernhard Riemann with a lucid discussion of current interaction between topology and physics, The author, a distinguished mathematical physicist, takes into account his own research at the Riemann archives of Göttingen University and developments over the last decade that connect Riemann with numerous significant ideas and methods reflected throughout contemporary mathematics and physics...read more

Product Description: A comprehensive reevaluation of Isaac Barrow (1630-1677), one of the more prominent and intriguing of all seventeenth-century men of science. Barrow is remembered today--if at all--only as Sir Isaac Newton's mentor and patron, but he in fact made important contributions to the disciplines of optics and geometry...read more

Product Description: Alfred Tarski, one of the greatest logicians of all time, is widely thought of as 'the man who defined truth'. His mathematical work on the concepts of truth and logical consequence are cornerstones of modern logic, influencing developments in philosophy, linguistics and computer science...read more

Product Description: She is best known for her curve, the witch of Agnesi, which appears in almost all high school and undergraduate math books. She was a child prodigy who frequented the salon circuit, discussing mathematics, philosophy, history, and music in multiple languages...read more

Looks at landmark mathematical discoveries over the past 2,500 years by such mathematicians as Euclid, Isaac Newton, Pierre Simon de Laplace, Georg Cantor, Alan Turing, and others, offering profiles of twenty-one important mathematical masters, facsimiles of their key works, and commentary on their contributions to the history of mathematics. Original.

A history of one of mathematics's most baffling conundrums looks at the century-old Poincaré Conjecture, a fundamental principle of modern geometry, topology, and the possible shape of the universe, as well as efforts by generations of mathematicians to find a solution to the problem, for which the Clay Mathematics Institute is offering a million-dollar prize. Reprint.

Product Description: The ideas of John von Neumann have had a profound influence on modern mathematics and science. One of the great thinkers of our century, von Neumann initiated major branches of mathematics--from operator algebras to game theory to scientific computing--and had a fundamental impact on such areas as self-adjoint operators, ergodic theory and the foundations of quantum mechanics, and numerical analysis and the design of the modern computer...read more

Product Description: Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer is a remarkable figure, both in the development of mathematics and in wider Dutch history. A mathematical genius with strong mystical and philosophical leanings, he advocated the intuitionist view of mathematics and science as a constructive mental activity...read more

Product Description: This volume contains the work of the great Swiss mathematician on differential geometry, a field marked by some of his greatest achievements. Between 1690 and 1700, Jacob Bernoulli published twelve treatises in the scientific journal Acta Eruditorum on the use of infinitesimal methods to answer geometrical questions...read more