History & Philosophy

John Napier (1550-1617) is celebrated today as the man who invented logarithms--an enormous intellectual achievement that would soon lead to the development of their mechanical equivalent in the slide rule: the two would serve humanity as the principal...

This enthralling biography tells the complete story of one of Tudor England's most enigmatic figures. A Welshman born in Tenby, south Wales, c.1512, Robert Recorde was educated at both Oxford and Cambridge. This book, a detailed biography of this Tudor...

An engrossing look at the history and importance of a centuries-old but still unanswered math problemFor centuries, mathematicians the world over have tried, and failed, to solve the zeta-3 problem. Math genius Leonhard Euler attempted it in the 1700s...

Published in 1903, this book was the first comprehensive treatise on the logical foundations of mathematics written in English. It sets forth, as far as possible without mathematical and logical symbolism, the grounds in favour of the view that...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780679738077Author John Allen PaulosFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 261gDimensions(mm) 203mm...

The first history of postwar mathematics, offering a new interpretation of the rise of abstraction and axiomatics in the twentieth century. Why did abstraction dominate American art, social science, and natural science in the mid-twentieth century? Why,...

Plato's Ghost is the first book to examine the development of mathematics from 1880 to 1920 as a modernist transformation similar to those in art, literature, and music. Jeremy Gray traces the growth of mathematical modernism from its roots in problem...

Heavenly Mathematics traces the rich history of spherical trigonometry, revealing how the cultures of classical Greece, medieval Islam, and the modern West used this forgotten art to chart the heavens and the Earth. Once at the heart of astronomy and...

While all of us regularly use basic math symbols such as those for plus, minus, and equals, few of us know that many of these symbols weren't available before the sixteenth century. What did mathematicians rely on for their work before then? And how did...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780143120070Author Charles SeifeFormat PaperbackPage Count 320Imprint Penguin USAPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 265gDimensions(mm) 201mm * 132mm...

The fascinating true story of mathematician Maria Agnesi.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...

How do scientists look at chance, or randomness, and chaos in physical systems? In answering this question for a general audience, Ruelle writes in the best French tradition: he has produced an authoritative and elegant book--a model of clarity,...

The invention of numerals is perhaps the greatest abstraction the human mind has ever created. Virtually everything in our lives is digital, numerical, or quantified. The story of how and where we got these numerals has for thousands of years been...

Dyma gyfrol sy'n croniclo bywyd a gwaith Griffith Davies (1788-1855), o'i blentyndod tlawd yn ardal chwareli Arfon i'w waith fel sefydlydd ysgolion mathemateg yn Llundain cyn gosod sylfaen i'r proffesiwn actiwari. Tri mis yn unig o addysg ffurfiol a...

Trigonometry has always been an underappreciated branch of mathematics. It has a reputation as a dry and difficult subject, a glorified form of geometry complicated by tedious computation. In this book, Eli Maor draws on his remarkable talents as a guide...

In the words of the great poet Senghor, Cedric Villani makes the bold claim that Mathematics is the Poetry of Science. Perhaps paradoxical to some, both disciplines are concerned with describing the world around us, understanding its parts, and using...

When mathematician Hermann Weyl decided to write a book on philosophy, he faced what he referred to as "conflicts of conscience"--the objective nature of science, he felt, did not mesh easily with the incredulous, uncertain nature of philosophy. Yet the...

Not all scientific explanations work by describing causal connections between events or the world's overall causal structure. Some mathematical proofs explain why the theorems being proved hold. In this book, Marc Lange proposes philosophical accounts of...

Emphasizing the creative nature of mathematics, this conversational textbook guides students through the process of discovering a proof. The material revolves around possible strategies to approaching a problem without classifying 'types of proofs' or...

Mathematics holds a central place in the traditional liberal arts. The four mathematical disciplines of the quadrivium-arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy-reveal their enduring significance in this work, which offers the first unified, textbook...

Stewart Shapiro presents a distinctive and persuasive view of the foundations of mathematics, arguing controversially that second-order logic has a central role to play in laying these foundations. To support this contention, he first gives a detailed...

Al-Khwarizmi was a mathematician, astronomer and geographer. He worked most of his life as a scholar in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad during the first half of the 9th century and is considered by many to be the father of algebra. His Algebra (Kitab...

In this 2013 winner of the prestigious R.R. Hawkins Award from the Association of American Publishers, as well as the 2013 PROSE Awards for Mathematics and Best in Physical Sciences & Mathematics, also from the AAP, readers will find many of the most...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9789395034135Author G H HardyFormat HardbackPage Count 82Imprint Hawk PressPublisher Hawk PressWeight(grams) 254gDimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm * 8mm

Kurt Goedel (1906 - 1978) was the most outstanding logician of the twentieth century, famous for his hallmark works on the completeness of logic, the incompleteness of number theory, and the consistency of the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis...

The twentieth century was a time of unprecedented development in mathematics, as well as in all sciences: more theorems were proved and results found in a hundred years than in all of previous history. In The Mathematical Century, Piergiorgio Odifreddi...

This monograph examines the private annotations that Ludwig Wittgenstein made to his copy of G.H. Hardy's classic textbook, A Course of Pure Mathematics. Complete with actual images of the annotations, it gives readers a more complete picture of...

Published with the aid of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.Contains the only complete English-language text of The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages. Tarski made extensive corrections and revisions of the original...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262544269Author Gabriele LolliFormat PaperbackPage Count 176Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press Ltd

A guide to the practical art of plausible reasoning, this book has relevance in every field of intellectual activity. Professor Polya, a world-famous mathematician from Stanford University, uses mathematics to show how hunches and guesses play an...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780262542296Author Matt CookFormat PaperbackPage Count 368Imprint MIT PressPublisher MIT Press Ltd

What is algebra? For some, it is an abstract language of x's and y's. For mathematics majors and professional mathematicians, it is a world of axiomatically defined constructs like groups, rings, and fields. Taming the Unknown considers how these two...

As Eugene Wigner stressed, mathematics has proven unreasonably effective in the physical sciences and their technological applications. The role of mathematics in the biological, medical and social sciences has been much more modest but has recently...

Alfred Tarski, one of the greatest logicians of all time, is widely thought of as 'the man who defined truth'. His work on the concepts of truth and logical consequence are cornerstones of modern logic, influencing developments in mathematics,...

Mathematicians call it the Monty Hall Problem, and it is one of the most interesting mathematical brain teasers of recent times. Imagine that you face three doors, behind one of which is a prize. You choose one but do not open it. The host--call him...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780979671593Author Edip YukselFormat PaperbackPage Count 622Imprint Brainbow PressPublisher Brainbow PressWeight(grams) 898gDimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm *...

In the third volume in the Rutgers Lectures in Philosophy series, distinguished philosopher Robert Stalnaker here offers a defense of an ontology of propositions, and of some logical resources for representing them. He offers an austere formulation of a...

The Equation of Knowledge: From Bayes' Rule to a Unified Philosophy of Science introduces readers to the Bayesian approach to science: teasing out the link between probability and knowledge. The author strives to make this book accessible to a very broad...

A guide to the practical art of plausible reasoning, this book has relevance in every field of intellectual activity. Professor Polya, a world-famous mathematician from Stanford University, uses mathematics to show how hunches and guesses play an...

In this book, the author pays tribute to Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866), a mathematician with revolutionary ideas, whose work on the theory of integration, the Fourier transform, the hypergeometric differential equation, etc. contributed immensely to...