Pi: A Source Book


Book Description

This book documents the history of pi from the dawn of mathematical time to the present. One of the beauties of the literature on pi is that it allows for the inclusion of very modern, yet accessible, mathematics. The articles on pi collected herein fall into various classes. First and foremost there is a selection from the mathematical and computational literature of four millennia. There is also a variety of historical studies on the cultural significance of the number. Additionally, there is a selection of pieces that are anecdotal, fanciful, or simply amusing. For this new edition, the authors have updated the original material while adding new material of historical and cultural interest. There is a substantial exposition of the recent history of the computation of digits of pi, a discussion of the normality of the distribution of the digits, and new translations of works by Viete and Huygen.




Pi: A Source Book


Book Description

Our intention in this collection is to provide, largely through original writings, an ex tended account of pi from the dawn of mathematical time to the present. The story of pi reflects the most seminal, the most serious, and sometimes the most whimsical aspects of mathematics. A surprising amount of the most important mathematics and a signifi cant number of the most important mathematicians have contributed to its unfolding directly or otherwise. Pi is one of the few mathematical concepts whose mention evokes a response of recog nition and interest in those not concerned professionally with the subject. It has been a part of human culture and the educated imagination for more than twenty-five hundred years. The computation of pi is virtually the only topic from the most ancient stratum of mathematics that is still of serious interest to modern mathematical research. To pursue this topic as it developed throughout the millennia is to follow a thread through the history of mathematics that winds through geometry, analysis and special functions, numerical analysis, algebra, and number theory. It offers a subject that provides mathe maticians with examples of many current mathematical techniques as weIl as a palpable sense of their historical development. Why a Source Book? Few books serve wider potential audiences than does a source book. To our knowledge, there is at present no easy access to the bulk of the material we have collected.




A History of Chinese Mathematics


Book Description

This book is made up of two parts, the first devoted to general, historical and cultural background, and the second to the development of each subdiscipline that together comprise Chinese mathematics. The book is uniquely accessible, both as a topical reference work, and also as an overview that can be read and reread at many levels of sophistication by both sinologists and mathematicians alike.




On Their Own Terms


Book Description

In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.




Euclid's Elements


Book Description

"The book includes introductions, terminology and biographical notes, bibliography, and an index and glossary" --from book jacket.




The History of Mathematical Proof in Ancient Traditions


Book Description

This radical, profoundly scholarly book explores the purposes and nature of proof in a range of historical settings. It overturns the view that the first mathematical proofs were in Greek geometry and rested on the logical insights of Aristotle by showing how much of that view is an artefact of nineteenth-century historical scholarship. It documents the existence of proofs in ancient mathematical writings about numbers and shows that practitioners of mathematics in Mesopotamian, Chinese and Indian cultures knew how to prove the correctness of algorithms, which are much more prominent outside the limited range of surviving classical Greek texts that historians have taken as the paradigm of ancient mathematics. It opens the way to providing the first comprehensive, textually based history of proof.




Bunny


Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Soon to be a major motion picture "Jon Swift + Witches of Eastwick + Kelly 'Get In Trouble' Link + Mean Girls + Creative Writing Degree Hell! No punches pulled, no hilarities dodged, no meme unmangled! O Bunny you are sooo genius!" —Margaret Atwood, via Twitter "A wild, audacious and ultimately unforgettable novel." —Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Times "Awad is a stone-cold genius." —Ann Bauer, The Washington Post The Vegetarian meets Heathers in this darkly funny, seductively strange novel from the acclaimed author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl and Rouge "We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn't we?" Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England's Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and seem to move and speak as one. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' fabled "Smut Salon," and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies' sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus "Workshop" where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision. The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination. Named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, Electric Literature, and The New York Public Library




The Only Award-Winning English Translation of Sun Tzu's the Art of War: More Complete and More Accurate


Book Description

The only translation that shows the original Chinese with a transliteration of each character side-by-side with the English sentence translation. Includes a glossary explaining Sun Tzu's definitions of the key Chinese concepts. There are many translations of The Art of War, but this is only truly accurate version written by America's leading expert on Sun Tzu's system. Winner of the Independent Publishers Book Award for the best Multicultural Nonfiction book of the year! Seven Ways Better Than All Other Translations! 1.More complete: Based on the complete compilation of all historical sources and academic research rather than on traditional fragmentary sources. 2. More accurate: Shows the original Chinese phrases (thousands of characters), individually translates each character (a transliteration), translates each phrase into an English sentence, and provides details of the key concepts that cannot be translated. 3.More concise: Its side-by-side format makes it impossible to add or subtract from the Chinese source or secretly add the translator's editorial opinions. All commentaries are clearly separated from the translation and text. 4.More authoritative: Translated by America's leading expert on Sun Tzu, who has written over two dozen books explaining the strategic concepts in the text. 5. More consistent: Eliminates the imprecise word choices that create the obvious internal contradictions so common in most other translations. 6. More balanced: Offers one English sentence for each Chinese phrase to preserve the balance of ideas in the original work. 7.More organized: Retains and numbers the original phrase groups to preserve the contextual relationships for easy study. You can compare this version to other translations and immediately see where other English translation depart from the original Chinese into the translators' own opinions and commentaries. This version won the award not just for being the best translation or the best book about Asian philosophy, but the best of all books in 2003 explaining another culture anywhere in the world. Reviews "Supremely Accurate bilingual edition...Each two-page spread features the translated lines into English on one side and the Chinese ideograms with their meanings on the other so that dedicated readers can readily understand the range of meaning in the original text...The definitive version of The Art of War for those English speakers who truly want to understand it..." June 2003, Wisconsin Bookwatch "The Best...internally consistent between the translated concepts and so shows a level of knowledge and detail that is not present in some other translations. As a translator, the author obviously sees the big picture...Gary Gagliardi is considered by many to be a leading expert in understanding and using the competitive methods embodied in Sun Tzu's treatise on the art of war." HAROLD MCFARLAND, editor, Reader's Preference Reviews, Midwest Book Review Contents: Preface: Award-Winning Translation9 Introduction: Sun Tzu's Basic Concepts17 1Analysis 31 2Going to War45 3Analyzing Attacks58 4Positioning69 5Momentum 81 6Weakness and Strength93 7Armed Conflict109 8Adaptability 123 9Armed March133 10Field Position153 11Types of Terrain171 12Attacking With Fire197 13Using Spies209 Glossary of Key Chinese Characters220 Index of Major Topics224 About the Translator and Author226 Art of War Books by Gary Gagliardi.227




Sophie's World


Book Description

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.




The Suàn Shù Shū


Book Description