How to Free Your Inner Mathematician
Notes on Mathematics and Life
1st Edition
Published on 26. March 2020
352 pages
978-0-19-258173-0 (ISBN)
Description
How to Free Your Inner Mathematician: Notes on Mathematics and Life offers readers guidance in managing the fear, freedom, frustration, and joy that often accompany calls to think mathematically. With practical insight and years of award-winning mathematics teaching experience, D'Agostino offers more than 300 hand-drawn sketches alongside accessible descriptions of fractals, symmetry, fuzzy logic, knot theory, Penrose patterns, infinity, the Twin Prime Conjecture, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, Fermat's Last Theorem, and other intriguing mathematical topics.
Readers are encouraged to embrace change, proceed at their own pace, mix up their routines, resist comparison, have faith, fail more often, look for beauty, exercise their imaginations, and define success for themselves.
Mathematics students and enthusiasts will learn advice for fostering courage on their journey regardless of age or mathematical background. How to Free Your Inner Mathematician delivers not only engaging mathematical content but provides reassurance that mathematical success has more to do with curiosity and drive than innate aptitude.
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Other editions
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Book
03/2020
Oxford University Press
€44.63
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Person
Susan D'Agostino is a mathematician and writer whose essays have been published in Quanta Magazine, Scientific American, Financial Times, Nature, Undark, Times Higher Education, Chronicle of Higher Education, Math Horizons, Mathematics Teacher, and others. She earned her PhD in Mathematics from Dartmouth College, Master of Arts in Teaching Mathematics from Smith College, and BA in Anthropology from Bard College. She is a Council for the Advancement of Science Writing Taylor/Blakeslee Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Her website is www.susandagostino.com and her Twitter handle is @susan_dagostino.
Content
- 1: Mix up your routine, as cicadas with prime number cycles
- 2: Grow in accessible directions, like Voronoi diagrams
- 3: Rely on your reasoning abilities, because folded paper may reach the moon
- 4: Define success for yourself, given Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
- 5: Reach for the stars, just like Katherine Johnson
- 6: Find the right match, as with binary numbers and computers
- 7: Act natural, because of Benford's Law
- 8: Resist comparison, because of chaos theory
- 9: Look all around, as Archimedes did in life
- 10: Walk through the problem, as on the Konigsborg bridges
- 11: Untangle problems, with knot theory
- 12: Consider all options, as the shortest path between two points is not always straight
- 13: Look for beauty, because of Fibonacci numbers
- 14: Divide and conquer, just like Riemann sums in calculus
- 15: Embrace change, considering non-Euclidean geometry
- 16: Pursue an easier approach, considering the Pigeonhole Principle
- 17: Make an educated guess, like Kepler with his Sphere-packing Conjecture
- 18: Proceed at your own pace, because of terminal velocity
- 19: Pay attention to details, as Earth is an oblate spheroid
- 20: Join the community, with Hilbert's 23 problems
- 21: Search for like-minded math friends, because of the Twin Prime Conjecture
- 22: Abandon perfectionism, because of the Hairy Ball Theorem
- 23: Enjoy the pursuit, as Andrew Wiles did with Fermat's Last Theorem
- 24: Design your own pattern, because of the Penrose Patterns
- 25: Keep it simple whenever possible, since
- 26: Change your perspective, with Viviani's Theorem
- 27: Explore, on a Mobius strip
- 28: Be contradictory, because of the infinitude of primes
- 29: Cooperate when possible, because of game theory
- 30: Consider the less-travelled path, because of the Jordan Curve Theorem
- 31: Investigate, because of the golden rectangle
- 32: Be okay with small steps, as the harmonic series grows without bound
- 33: Work efficiently, like bacteriophages with icosahedral symmetry
- 34: Find the right balance, as in coding theory
- 35: Draw a picture, as in proofs without words
- 36: Incorporate nuance, because of fuzzy logic
- 37: Be grateful when solutions exist, because of Brouwer's Fixed Point Theorem
- 38: Update your understanding, with Bayesian statistics
- 39: Keep an open mind, because imaginary numbers exist
- 40: Appreciate the process, by taking a random walk
- 41: Fail more often, just like Albert Einstein did with
- 42: Get disoriented, on a Klein bottle
- 43: Go outside your realm of experience, on a hypercube
- 44: Follow your curiosity, along a space-filling curve
- 45: Exercise your imagination, with fractional dimensions
- 46: Proceed with care, because some infinities are larger than others
