Here are 100 books that Symmetry fans have personally recommended if you like
Symmetry.
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As a full professor of mathematics for over 30 years, I have been engaged in research and teaching. Research can be difficult to describe to non-experts, but some important advances in mathematics can be explained to an interested public without the need for specialist knowledge, as I have done.
Frenkel came from the Soviet Union, where discrimination against Jews made it impossible for him to get into Moscow State University. During the oral exam they sent two graduate students to question him, pick holes in his responses, and ensure he failed. He turned to an informal network of Soviet mathematicians for help.
Like him, they were denied serious employment in the field, but after the 'cold war' against the Soviet Union, Harvard invited him to take a fellowship that later turned into a permanent job. Years later, when his old tormentor from Moscow State arrives to give a talk, he confronts the man in a lecture room with first-hand evidence of allegations against the system. Faced with a victim, the Russian mathematician's denials rang hollow.
This book reaches beyond mathematics to anyone of independent thought in an environment where it is not permitted to step out of line or,…
A New York Times Science BestsellerWhat if you had to take an art class in which you were only taught how to paint a fence? What if you were never shown the paintings of van Gogh and Picasso, weren't even told they existed? Alas, this is how math is taught, and so for most of us it becomes the intellectual equivalent of watching paint dry.In Love and Math , renowned mathematician Edward Frenkel reveals a side of math we've never seen, suffused with all the beauty and elegance of a work of art. In this heartfelt and passionate book, Frenkel…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
As a full professor of mathematics for over 30 years, I have been engaged in research and teaching. Research can be difficult to describe to non-experts, but some important advances in mathematics can be explained to an interested public without the need for specialist knowledge, as I have done.
It provides an engaging description of the work that went into proving a famous result, first mentioned by the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat in the margin of a book.
The question was whether a sum of two nth powers of whole numbers could be the nth power of a whole number. It is certainly true for n = 2 but was not known for any n greater than 2. Fermat thought he had a proof that this was the case but later wrote proofs when n was 3 or 4, so his earlier claim was not taken seriously.
The general result turned out to be much harder than anyone imagined, and 350 years later, its truth was implied by another conjecture that was finally proved by Andrew Wiles, as this book explains. I admire the fact that the author distills some essential points from what turned out to be…
'I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.'
It was with these words, written in the 1630s, that Pierre de Fermat intrigued and infuriated the mathematics community. For over 350 years, proving Fermat's Last Theorem was the most notorious unsolved mathematical problem, a puzzle whose basics most children could grasp but whose solution eluded the greatest minds in the world. In 1993, after years of secret toil, Englishman Andrew Wiles announced to an astounded audience that he had cracked Fermat's Last Theorem. He had no idea of the nightmare that lay…
As a full professor of mathematics for over 30 years, I have been engaged in research and teaching. Research can be difficult to describe to non-experts, but some important advances in mathematics can be explained to an interested public without the need for specialist knowledge, as I have done.
This unique book presents stories about mathematics, such as The Young Archimedes by Aldous Huxley and Peter Learns Arithmetic by H. G. Wells. It and its sequel are a mine of fascinating short stories.
It's well worth keeping and rereading. I found both it and its sequel fun to read.
Clifton Fadiman's classic collection of mathematical stories, essays and anecdotes is now once again available. Ranging from the poignant to the comical via the simply surreal, these selections include writing by Aldous Huxley, Martin Gardner, H.G. Wells, George Gamow, G.H. Hardy, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and many others. Humorous, mysterious, and always entertaining, this collection is sure to bring a smile to the faces of mathematicians and non-mathematicians alike.
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
As a full professor of mathematics for over 30 years, I have been engaged in research and teaching. Research can be difficult to describe to non-experts, but some important advances in mathematics can be explained to an interested public without the need for specialist knowledge, as I have done.
This book presents excerpts from original contributions to mathematics by scholars of the past. It includes principal developments from Neolithic times, from Mesopotamia, and from the ancient Greeks, right up to the modern world.
The extensive and well-chosen quotations make this a unique book. I found the excerpts from original sources rendered it a mine of valuable information for me or anyone else interested in the long history of mathematics.
In 1922 Barnes Wallis, who later invented the bouncing bomb immortalized in the movie The Dam Busters, fell in love for the first and last time, aged 35. The object of his affection, Molly Bloxam, was 17 and setting off to study science at University College London. Her father decreed that the two could correspond only if Barnes taught Molly mathematics in his letters.
Mathematics with Love presents, for the first time, the result of this curious dictat: a series of witty, tender and totally accessible introductions to calculus, trigonometry and electrostatic induction that remarkably, wooed and won the girl.…
Meaningful communications with people through life, books, and films have always given me a certain kind of mental nirvana of being transported to a place of delight. I see fine writing as an informative and entertaining conversation with a stranger I just met on a plane who has interesting things to say about the world. Books of narrative merit in mathematics and science are my strangers eager to be met. For me, the best narratives are those that bring me to places I have never been, to tell me things I have not known, and to keep me reading with the feeling of being alive in a human experience.
This book is a brilliant interweaving of politics, history, and intrigue, with characters living ordinary lives, described in the spirit of a Russian novel. With one story threading into another, the book moves us forwards. We fly over the tall mountains, misty valleys, and green fields of current abstract maths and fundamental physics to witness the true beauties of truth. And in the end, Stewart confesses: “No one could have predicted that a pedantic question about equations could reveal the deep structure of the physical world, but that is exactly what's happened.”
As with many of Stewart’s books, Why Beauty is Truth is a joy to read. It brings us through current material with ease of understanding and out oversimplifying. I love the way Stewart uses tangible examples to describe the fundamental forces of nature as he escorts us with clarity through so many eloquent connections between mathematics and physics.…
At the heart of relativity theory, quantum mechanics, string theory, and much of modern cosmology lies one concept: symmetry. In Why Beauty Is Truth , world-famous mathematician Ian Stewart narrates the history of the emergence of this remarkable area of study. Stewart introduces us to such characters as the Renaissance Italian genius, rogue, scholar, and gambler Girolamo Cardano, who stole the modern method of solving cubic equations and published it in the first important book on algebra, and the young revolutionary Evariste Galois, who refashioned the whole of mathematics and founded the field of group theory only to die in…
I experienced being a parent as a return to my own childhood. As much as I enjoyed teaching my children, I loved learning from them as well. That got me thinking about how one might recapture the joys and insights of childhood. As a philosopher interested in education, I have long wondered whether we leave childhood behind or somehow carry it with us into old age. I discovered that several important philosophers, such as Aristotle, Augustine, and Rousseau have keen insights about the relation of childhood to adulthood. And the biblical Jesus seems to have been the first person to suggest that adults can learn from children.
What if children are not little adults but a different species? Perhaps children are butterflies who develop into caterpillars? Child psychologist Allision Gopnik asks wonderful questions about human development. She notes that most of us produce our best art and ask our deepest questions (“Why is the sky blue?”) as small children.
Childhood, she says, is our time of basic research; adulthood is the time for practical applications. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she celebrates the unique gifts of childhood, but she does not offer suggestions about how we might recapture those gifts.
In the last decade there has been a revolution in our understanding of the minds of infants and young children. We used to believe that babies were irrational, and that their thinking and experience were limited. Now Alison Gopnik ― a leading psychologist and philosopher, as well as a mother ― explains the cutting-edge scientific and psychological research that has revealed that babies learn more, create more, care more, and experience more than we could ever have imagined. And there is good reason to believe that babies are actually smarter, more thoughtful, and more conscious than adults. In a lively…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
As a kid I read every popular math book I could lay my hands on. When I became a mathematician I wanted to do more than teaching and research. I wanted to tell everyone what a wonderful and vital subject math is. I started writing popular math books, and soon was up to my neck in radio, TV, news media, magazines... For 12 years I wrote the mathematical Recreations Column for Scientific American. I was only the second mathematician in 170 years to deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, on TV with a live tiger. The University changed my job description: half research, half ‘outreach’. I had my dream job.
Mathematicians are constantly baffled by the public’s lack of awareness, not just of what mathematics does, but what it is. Today’s technological society functions only because of a vast range of mathematical concepts, techniques, and discoveries, which go far beyond elementary arithmetic and algebra. This was one of the first books to tackle these misunderstandings head on. It does so by examining not just the math and what it’s used for, but the social structures, the ‘conditions of civilization’ that have brought us to this curious state: utterly dependent on math, almost universally unaware that we are.
"A passionate plea against the use of formal mathematical reasoning as a method for solving mankind's problems. . . . An antidote to the Cartesian view that mathematical and scientific knowledge will suffice to solve the central problems of human existence." — The New York Times "These cogitations can and should be read by every literate person." — Science Books and Films "A warning against being seduced or intimidated by mathematics into accepting bad science, bad policies, and bad personal decisions." — Philadelphia Inquirer Rationalist philosopher and mathematician René Descartes visualized a world unified by mathematics, in which all intellectual…
Having a master's degree in chemical engineering, I wasn't destined to work in the area of quantitative finance… the reason why I professionally moved to this discipline aren't worth exposing, but as a matter of fact, I've been quickly fascinated by this science, and encountered some of my favorites, such as maths and statistics, as used in the traditional activity of an engineer. And I had many opportunities of combining the knowledge and practice of financial markets with pragmatism, typically of the engineer’s education, i.e. oriented toward problem solving. In addition, I've always loved teaching, and writing books on financial markets & instruments, hence the importance I'm giving to pedagogy in professional books.
Having read or browsed many books dedicated to the mathematics of options and other derivative instruments, I unquestionably consider Neftci’s book as by far the best choice.
Starting with the fundamentals, it goes much further than a simple “introduction”, and typically fits with the needs of a “quant” specializing in options, with a good balance between pure theoretical, mathematical developments (such as Partial Differential Equations, Girsanov theorem, Markov processes, etc) and practical applications on option pricing.
An Introduction to the Mathematics of Financial Derivatives, Second Edition, introduces the mathematics underlying the pricing of derivatives.
The increased interest in dynamic pricing models stems from their applicability to practical situations: with the freeing of exchange, interest rates, and capital controls, the market for derivative products has matured and pricing models have become more accurate. This updated edition has six new chapters and chapter-concluding exercises, plus one thoroughly expanded chapter. The text answers the need for a resource targeting professionals, Ph.D. students, and advanced MBA students who are specifically interested in financial derivatives.
Philosophy’s core questions have always obsessed me: What is real? What makes life worth living? Can knowledge be made secure? In graduate school at the University of Virginia I was drawn to mathematically formalized approaches to such questions, especially those of C. S. Peirce and Alain Badiou. More recently, alongside colleagues at Endicott College’s Center for Diagrammatic and Computational Philosophy and GCAS College Dublin I have explored applications of diagrammatic logic, category theory, game theory, and homotopy type theory to such problems as abductive inference and artificial intelligence. Philosophers committed to the perennial questions have much to gain today from studying the new methods and results of contemporary mathematics.
The Univalent Foundations program in foundations of mathematics launched by Voevodsky and others in the past decade and a half has contributed to a promising new paradigm unifying computation, mathematics, logic, and proof theory.
Understanding the core elements of this research program, Homotopy Type Theory, is essential for contemporary philosophers who want to engage directly with current developments in mathematics and computer science.
Corfield is a well-established name in philosophy of mathematics, and this book is the best introduction to Homotopy Type Theory for philosophers.
Working within themes and problematics that will be familiar to philosophers with a basic background in logic, Corfield covers the elementary constructions of homotopy types from a logical point of view and provides plenty of provocative suggestions for how these formal tools might reinvigorate philosophical research today.
"The old logic put thought in fetters, while the new logic gives it wings."
For the past century, philosophers working in the tradition of Bertrand Russell - who promised to revolutionise philosophy by introducing the 'new logic' of Frege and Peano - have employed predicate logic as their formal language of choice. In this book, Dr David Corfield presents a comparable revolution with a newly emerging logic - modal homotopy type theory.
Homotopy type theory has recently been developed as a new foundational language for mathematics, with a strong philosophical pedigree. Modal Homotopy Type Theory: The Prospect of a New…
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
I'm a writer, programmer, traveler and avid reader of interesting things. For the last ten years I've been experimenting to find out how to learn and think better. I don't promise I have all the answers, just a place to start.
Oakley is best known for her co-instruction of Learning How to Learn, one of the most popular Coursera courses that has had millions of students. This book offers a science-driven perspective for how to get good at math. Oakley walks her talk too, specializing in linguistics she only became a professor of engineering later, despite some difficulties with math.
The companion book to COURSERA®'s wildly popular massive open online course "Learning How to Learn"
Whether you are a student struggling to fulfill a math or science requirement, or you are embarking on a career change that requires a new skill set, A Mind for Numbers offers the tools you need to get a better grasp of that intimidating material. Engineering professor Barbara Oakley knows firsthand how it feels to struggle with math. She flunked her way through high school math and science courses, before enlisting in the army immediately after graduation. When she saw how her lack of mathematical…
