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The powers and pleasures of mathematics.
By John Allen Paulos
Numbers carry facts, ideas, information, and intelligence of every sort. What are the consequences of not understanding the relationships and probabilities they express? From sports to stocks, lotteries to political polls and elections, Paulos provides an enlightening-and entertaining-course in the costs of innumeracy.
By Clifford Pickover
From Archimedes' Spiral to Rubik's Cube, with stops along a timeline of insight and discovery that stretches across millennia, this anthology charts 250 milestones in mathematical history. Topics include the discovery of pi and the calculus, the butterfly effect, cryptography, key formulas and concepts, and much more -- all illustrated with art, diagrams, and photos.
By Paul Lockhart
"If I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child's natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn't possibly do as good a job as is currently being done -- I simply wouldn't have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education." Does math class have to be "stupid and boring"? Lockhart, a research mathematician who has devoted his career to teaching K-12 level kids, doesn't think so, and passionately explains why.
One Hundred Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know: Math Explains Your World
By John D. Barrow
Why six degrees of separation and not seven? Noted cosmologist Barrow uses math to illuminate conundrums buried in everyday experience, and manages to uncover the speculative delights of mathematics itself. In a series of brief and engaging essays, he employs aspects of algebra, trigonometry, and calculus as, alternately, telescopes and microscopes to reveal clever perspectives on reality.
By Lillian Lieber
A wonderful excursion into the realm of the mathematical imagination in the company of T. C. Mits -- better known to all of us as The Celebrated Man in the Street. First published more than six decades ago, Lillian Lieber's whimsical survey of topics from the commutative law to multiplication to Einstein's theory of relativity is a wise and witty gem.
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"The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," Jean Strouse writes of her subject's more famous brothers, "Alice simply lived." It took a biographer of sensitivity and brilliance to give that "simply" the profundity it deserves, and the resulting book, now reissued in the peerless NYRB Classics series, is one of the richest life stories you'll ever read.
The world of Jane Austen's fiction has long been an imaginative playground for writers and readers of a certain stripe. Shannon Hale's Austenland wittily took the next step, setting comic romance in a faux-Pemberly resort for the Darcy-smitten. Her latest returns for more Regency fun, but with a twist: does murder stalk Pembrook Park?
Childlike retreat? Arts and crafts challenge? Frugal and eco-friendly living option? The notion of the "tiny house" has the surprising potential to fire the imagination. In this exuberant volume of sketches, plans, and commentary, the artist Derek Diedricksen shares his infectious enthusiasm for the idea of the micro-mansion.
