100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You didn't know by Barrow, John D. (2008) Hardcover - Hardcover

Barrow, John D.

3.44

491 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1847920039 ISBN 13: 9781847920034

Publisher: Bodley Head, 2008

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Mathematics can tell us things about the world that can€™t be learned in any other way. This hugely informative and wonderfully entertaining little book answers one hundred essential questions about existence. It unravels the knotty questions, clarifies the conundrums, and sheds light into dark corners.From winning the lottery, placing bets at the races and escaping from bears, to sports, Shakespeare, Google, game theory, drunks, divorce settlements and dodgy accounting; from chaos to infinity and everything in between, One Hundred Essential Questions of Existence Answered! has all the answers!

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About the Author:

John D. Barrow is Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Director of the Millennium Mathematics Project at Cambridge University. He is the author of many acclaimed books about the significance of modern developments in physics, astronomy and mathematics, including: The Book of Nothing; The Constants of Nature; and The Infinite Book.

From School Library Journal:

Adult/High School—This collection of bloglike entries is not, as the title would have readers believe, a series of just-so stories, although occasional essays explain such everyday phenomena as why the other line always seems to move faster. More often, though, they are constructed around implausible hypotheticals (what if a soccer league changed scoring rules retroactively?) or end before fully explaining real-world implications. As the selections accumulate, however, it becomes clear that Barrow is interested not in how "math explains your world," but something more subtle: how the world illuminates math. Each piece is an access point to a different aspect of math: probability, trigonometry, algebra, calculus, and much more, but this is not a dry collection of derivations and theorems. Barrow's enthusiastic willingness to use any excuse (however slim) to employ math quickly becomes infectious, and the brevity that at first seems to truncate topics instead serves his holistic view of math as a joyous investigation of the world. As probably the largest population using higher-level math on a regular basis, teens are uniquely positioned to understand and share Barrow's enthusiasms. For those who find something mysterious and intriguing in solving an equation, this collection is a fascinating look into the mind of a professional mathematician and the way in which math can be not simply a row of numbers but a way of looking at the world.—Mark Flowers, John F. Kennedy Library, Vallejo, CA
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