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Lädt ... Alex No Pais dos Numeros - Alexs Adventures In Nu (Em Portugues do Brasil) (Original 2011; 2011. Auflage)von Alex Bellos
Werk-InformationenAlex im Wunderland der Zahlen: Eine Reise durch die aufregende Welt der Mathematik von Alex Bellos (Author) (2011)
Lädt ...
Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. Summary: Good set of essays about different ways to look at mathematics and numbers. Each one got me thinking in different ways. You could read one after the other or pick and mix if you like. Things I liked: Friendly style, relatable stories. Things I thought could be improved: Unfortunately I left my review too long ... and now I can't really think of anything. Highlight: The chapter on the 'golden ratio'. I applied this to making pancakes on the same weekend and haven't looked back since. Numbers are not ubiquitous in human societies. This is just one of the many facts that can be learned from “Here’s Looking At Euclid,” an entry on popular mathematics from Alex Bellos. That isn’t to say that numbers themselves are useless or that the people have no concept of number, they just don’t need to have numbers past five or so. I have heard of tribes of people that are like this, and it is quite fascinating. For instance, take the number line, you know, that thing you learned in second grade that organizes all the integers into an evenly spaced line. Apparently, if you tell a kindergartner or someone unfamiliar with numbering to arrange numbers from 1 to 10, they will arrange those numbers in a logarithmic fashion. After all, 10 is twice as large as 5. Thus, it is thought that ratios play a bigger part than exact answers. This makes sense. If you encounter a pride of lions, why bother counting the exact number of lions in the pride? It is sufficient to know if your tribe or troop has more members. There is other interesting information in the book as well. Take the idea of changing to base-12 for everything. This so-called “dozenal” system has many ardent supporters. It makes some fractions easier to grok. Some have even tried to go all the way to a base-60 system, but it requires far too many terms. It talks about why your average Chinese person can memorize more digits than your average English speaker (the words for the numbers are shorter, allowing them to fit more into the phonetic loop) and the mastery of the abacus for mental calculations. Some things seem obvious right now but were not to people of the past. Take the concept of nothing, the zero for instance. The zero has tons of utility as a placeholder and as a concept in and of itself. Without zero we might have to do arithmetic with Roman Numerals or something, and who honestly would want to do something so cumbersome? It talks about Vedic Mathematics, Mental Math, the method of exhaustion for finding the value of pi, and so on. Speaking of pi, that is another interesting subject. Back before we knew of algebraic expansions and series, we had to put a circle between two polygons. There were tons of contests and shows of prowess to get the number as accurate as possible. The fact that it isn’t practical wasn’t the point; the point was that it could be more accurate. It’s like people climbing Everest or going to the South Pole. Sometimes it is the romance that draws people. Some of it follows logically from the previously covered material. Take the idea of logarithms; immediately following those is the invention of the Slide Rule, the obsolete tool that got us to the Moon and back. Then there is the section on Recreational Mathematics. It covers Sudoku, Magic Squares, the Fifteen Puzzle, Tangrams, the Rubik’s Cube, Chess Problems, ambigrams, and Martin Gardner. Throughout the book are such interesting bits of trivia. The book doesn’t really contain many equations that would put a person off of reading it, and Bellos writes in a manner that shows his own fascination with the subject, and his enthusiasm shines through the pages.
With sprinklings of exclamation marks and anecdotes (mostly of meetings with eccentric mathematicians) among the equations, and chapter headings such as "The Life of Pi" and "The X-Factor", this is as reader-friendly as a book like this is going to get. I cannot promise that it will hold your keen interest all the time, but try not to be scared of it. It’s often said, for instance, that a translation can’t ever be an adequate substitute for the original. But a translation, Bellos writes, isn’t trying to be the same as the original, but to be like it. Which is why the usual conceptual duo of translation — fidelity, and the literal — is too clumsy. These ideas just derive from the misplaced anxiety that a translation is trying to be a substitute. When his book works, he's like an intrepid cosmic explorer, floating in an airship over a strange planet, and describing the fascinating things he sees. Down there, for example, on the eighth-century Northumbrian coast, he spots the Venerable Bede, who has worked out a way to count to a million simply by holding parts of his body. AuszeichnungenPrestigeträchtige Auswahlen
Whether writing about how algebra solved Swedish traffic problems, visiting the Mental Calculation World Cup to disclose the secrets of lightning calculation, or exploring the links between pineapples and beautiful teeth, Bellos guides his readers into the world of mathematics while uncovering fascinating stories of mathematical achievement--from the breakthroughs of Euclid, the greatest mathematician of all time, to the creations of today's Zen master of origami. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)513Natural sciences and mathematics Mathematics ArithmeticKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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I read this one slowly as each chapter is mostly self-contained and took some time to digest. He does refer back sometimes mostly because he references a lot of historical figures who were involved in various mathematical discoveries. ( )