Engineering Math

Many people take math in high school and promptly forget much of it. But math plays a part in all of our lives all of the time, whether we know it or not. In The Joy of x, Steven Strogatz expands on his hit New York Times series to explain the big ideas of math gently and clearly, with wit, and insight.

The brain is made up of 85 billion neurons, which are connected by over 100 trillion synapses. For over a century, a diverse array of researchers have been trying to find a language that can be used to capture the essence of what these neurons do and how they communicate - and how those communications create thoughts, perceptions, and actions. The language they were looking for was mathematics, and we would not be able to understand the brain as we do today without it.

In this eye-opening and extraordinary audiobook, Yates explores the true stories of life-changing events in which the application - or misapplication - of mathematics has played a critical role: patients crippled by faulty genes and entrepreneurs bankrupted by faulty algorithms; innocent victims of miscarriages of justice and the unwitting victims of software glitches. We follow stories of investors who have lost fortunes and parents who have lost children, all because of mathematical misunderstandings.

Many of the artists that we encounter are completely unaware of the mathematics that bubble beneath their craft, while some consciously use it for inspiration. Our instincts might tell us that these two subjects are incompatible forces with nothing in common – mathematics being the realm of precise logic and art being the realm of emotion and aesthetics – but what if we’re wrong? Blueprints asks us to consider that mathematics and art may not be polar opposites after all.

Bertrand Russell wrote that mathematics can exalt "as surely as poetry". This is especially true of one equation: ei(pi) + 1 = 0, the brainchild of Leonhard Euler, the Mozart of mathematics. More than two centuries after Euler's death, it is still regarded as a conceptual diamond of unsurpassed beauty. Called Euler's identity, or God's equation, it includes just five numbers but represents an astonishing revelation of hidden connections.

Learn how to tackle tricky maths problems with nothing but the back of an envelope, a pencil and some good old-fashioned brain power. Join Rob Eastaway as he takes an entertaining look at how to figure without a calculator. Packed with amusing anecdotes, quizzes, and handy calculation tips for every situation, Maths on the Back of an Envelope is an invaluable introduction to the art of estimation and a welcome reminder that sometimes our own brain is the best tool we have to deal with numbers.

Whether pondering black holes or predicting discoveries at CERN, physicists believe the best theories are beautiful, natural, and elegant, and this standard separates popular theories from disposable ones. This is why, Sabine Hossenfelder argues, we have not seen a major breakthrough in the foundations of physics for more than four decades. The belief in beauty has become so dogmatic that it now conflicts with scientific objectivity: Observation has been unable to confirm mindboggling theories, like supersymmetry or grand unification, invented by physicists based on aesthetic criteria.

We are living through a revolution in artificial intelligence that is not slowing down. This major shift is based on simple mathematics, some of which goes back centuries: linear algebra and calculus, the stuff of eighteenth-century mathematics. Indeed by the mid-1850s, a lot of the groundwork was all done. In this enlightening book, Anil Ananthaswamy explains the fundamental maths behind AI, which suggests that the basics of natural and artificial intelligence might follow the same mathematical rules.

Why do mobile phones work when you're on a train? What happens when you pull a pop song apart into pure sine waves and play it back on a piano? And what did mathematicians have to do with the great pig stampede of 2012? The answer to each of these questions can be found in the triangle. Join Matt Parker, stand-up comedian and author of the first ever maths book to be a No. 1 bestseller, as he uncovers the secrets of trigonometry and shares extraordinary stories about the mathematicians, philosophers and engineers who dared to take triangles seriously.

These stories from Quanta Magazine map the routes of mathematical exploration, showing listeners how cutting-edge research is done, while illuminating the productive tension between conjecture and proof, theory and intuition. Listeners of The Prime Number Conspiracy are headed on "breathtaking intellectual journeys to the bleeding edge of discovery strapped to the narrative rocket of humanity's never-ending pursuit of knowledge," says Quanta editor-in-chief Thomas Lin.

Are you fascinated by the cosmos and eager to explore the quantum realm without complex equations? Curious about wave-particle duality or how quantum theories impact everyday life, from computing to futuristic tech? Quantum Physics Simplified breaks down mind-bending concepts into engaging, easy-to-follow explanations, making the quantum world accessible to anyone with a curious mind.

Mathematical Mindsets provides practical strategies and activities to help teachers and parents show all children, even those who are convinced that they are bad at math, that they can enjoy and succeed in math. Jo Boaler - Stanford researcher, professor of math education, and expert on math learning - has studied why students don't like math and often fail in math classes. She's followed thousands of students through middle and high schools to study how they learn and to find the most effective ways to unleash the math potential in all students.

This 10-part history of mathematics reveals the personalities behind the calculations: the passions and rivalries of mathematicians struggling to get their ideas heard. Professor Marcus du Sautoy shows how these masters of abstraction find a role in the real world and proves that mathematics is the driving force behind modern science.

A brilliant research mathematician reveals math to be a creative art form on par with painting, poetry, and sculpture, and rejects the standard anxiety-producing teaching methods used in most schools today. Witty and accessible, Paul Lockhart's controversial approach will provoke spirited debate among educators and parents alike, altering the way we think about math forever.

Mathematics shapes almost everything we do. From building rockets to the handheld technology that governs our day-to-day lives, we are all in debt to the mathematical geniuses of the past. But the history of mathematics is warped; it looks like a sixteenth-century map that enlarges Europe at the expense of Africa, Asia and the Americas. The Secret Lives of Numbers introduces listeners to a new group of mathematical boundary-smashers, those who have been erased by history because of their race, gender or nationality.

Thomas Bayes was an eighteenth-century Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician whose obscure life belied the profound impact of his work. Like most research into probability at the time, his theorem - independently discovered a few years later by Pierre-Simon Laplace, the great French mathematician - was mainly seen as relevant to games of chance, like dice and cards. But its implications soon became clear, affecting fields as diverse as medicine, law and artificial intelligence.

Mathematics is a fundamental part of life, yet every one of us has a unique relationship with learning and understanding the subject. Working with numbers may inspire confidence in our abilities or provoke anxiety and trepidation. Stanford researcher, mathematics education professor, and the leading expert on math learning Dr. Jo Boaler argues that our differences are the key to unlocking our greatest mathematics potential.

One of the great mysteries of science is that its fundamental laws are written in the language of mathematics. Graham Farmelo's thrilling new book shows how modern maths has helped physicists to rethink gravity, space, and time. The Universe Speaks in Numbers takes us on an adventure from the Enlightenment to the present with a vibrant cast of characters, illuminating the most exciting and controversial developments in contemporary thought.

Math has a reputation for being inaccessible. People think that it requires a special gift or that comprehension is a matter of genes. Yet, the greatest mathematicians throughout history, from Rene Descartes to Alexander Grothendieck, have insisted that this is not the case.

The Math(s) Fix: An Education Blueprint for the AI Age is a groundbreaking book that exposes why math education is in crisis worldwide and how the only fix is a fundamentally new mainstream subject. It argues that today's math education is not working to elevate society with modern computation, data science, and AI. Instead, students are subjugated to compete with what computers do best and lose.