Imagine a giant snowflake in 196,884 dimensions... This is the story of a mathematical quest that began two hundred years ago in revolutionary France, led to the biggest collaboration ever between mathematicians across the world, and revealed the 'Monster' - not monstrous at all, but a structure of exquisite beauty and complexity. Told here for the first time in accessible prose, it is a story that involves brilliant yet tragic characters, curious number 'coincidences' that led to breakthr...

Addiction Literature's Past and Present aims to realign consideration of addiction as a transhistorical and transcultural aspect of the human condition. This book illuminates the premodern roots of the linguistic and narrative materials of addiction discourse and argues for Addiction Literature to be considered as a distinct literary phenomenon, with a history stretching back to Antiquity. Addiction, as it is understood in this book, exists at the intersection between appetite, ha...

Mathematics pervades our daily lives. It is intimately involved whenever one starts a car, switches on the television, flies on a plane, forecasts the weather, books a holiday on the internet, programmes a computer, navigates heavy traffic, analyses statistical data, or seeks a cure for a disease. Our credit cards and the nation's defence secrets are kept secure by encryption methods based on prime numbers.This book presents mathematics with a human face, celebrating the achievemen...

‘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 A...

**A stunning, globe-spanning journey through the beauty and power of mathematics“Powerful, passionate, and inspiring.” —New York TimesA New York Times Bestseller**What 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 wa...

Students and research workers in mathematics, physics, engineering and other sciences will find this compilation invaluable. All the information included is practical, rarely used results are excluded. Great care has been taken to present all results concisely and clearly. Excellent to keep as a handy reference! If you don't have a lot of time but want to excel in class, this book helps you: Brush up before tests Find answers fast Learn key formulas and tables Study quickly and more effect...

Long-listed for the 2016 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing AwardDelightfully readable, Spooky Action at a Distance is a mind-bending voyage to the frontiers of modern physics that will change the way we think about reality.What is space? It isn't a question that most of us normally ask. Space is the venue of physics; it's where things exist, where they move and take shape. Yet over the past...

E=mc2: It may be Einstein’s most well-known contribution to modern science, but how many people understand the thought process or physics behind this famous equation?In this collection of his seven most important essays on physics, Einstein guides his reader step-by-step through the many layers of scientific theory that formed a starting point for his discoveries. By both supporting and refuting the theories and scientific efforts of his predecessors, Einstein reve...

Bestselling author and astrophysicist Mario Livio examines the lives and theories of history’s greatest mathematicians to ask how—if mathematics is an abstract construction of the human mind—it can so perfectly explain the physical world.Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner once wondered about “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in the formulation of the laws of nature. Is God a Mathematician? investigates why mathematics is as powerful as it is. From ...

What do Bach's compositions, Rubik's Cube, the way we choose our mates, and the physics of subatomic particles have in common? All are governed by the laws of symmetry, which elegantly unify scientific and artistic principles. Yet the mathematical language of symmetry-known as group theory-did not emerge from the study of symmetry at all, but from an equation that couldn't be solved.For thousands of years mathematicians solved progressively more difficult algebraic equations, until...

It is one of the wonders of mathematics that, for every problem mathematicians solve, another awaits to perplex and galvanize them. Some of these problems are new, while others have puzzled and bewitched thinkers across the ages. Such challenges offer a tantalizing glimpse of the field's unlimited potential, and keep mathematicians looking toward the horizons of intellectual possibility.In Visions of Infinity, celebrated mathematician Ian Stewart provides a fascinating ove...

Alan Turing's 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, introducing the Turing machine, was a landmark of twentieth-century thought. It settled a deep problem in the foundations of mathematics, and provided the principle of the post-war electronic computer. It also supplied a new approach to the philosophy of the mind.Influenced by his crucial codebreaking work in the Second World War, and by practical pioneering of the first electronic computers, Turing argued that all the operations of t...