 Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | David Darling |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Mathematics |
| Publisher | Wiley |
Publication date | August 11, 2004 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) and audio-CD |
| Pages | 400 |
| ISBN | 0471270474 |
The Universal Book of Mathematics: From Abracadabra to Zeno's Paradoxes (2004) is a bestselling book by British author David Darling.
The book is presented in a dictionary format. The book is divided into headwords, which, as the title suggests, run from Abracadabra to Zeno's paradoxes.
The book also provides relevant diagrams and illustrations.
The first edition of the book had several errors which were fixed in later editions. Several famous scientists have sent in corrections to the author of the book. These include Warren Johnson and Freeman Dyson. [1]
The book has been praised by BoingBoing [2] and British newspaper The Independent . [3]
Problems and Puzzles mentioned in the book have been discussed and debated several times by several major mathematicians. [4]
A paradox, also known as an antinomy, is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically unacceptable conclusion. A paradox usually involves contradictory-yet-interrelated elements—that exist simultaneously and persist over time.
Zeno's paradoxes are a set of philosophical problems generally thought to have been devised by Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea to support Parmenides' doctrine that contrary to the evidence of one's senses, the belief in plurality and change is mistaken, and in particular that motion is nothing but an illusion. It is usually assumed, based on Plato's Parmenides (128a–d), that Zeno took on the project of creating these paradoxes because other philosophers had created paradoxes against Parmenides' view. Thus Plato has Zeno say the purpose of the paradoxes "is to show that their hypothesis that existences are many, if properly followed up, leads to still more absurd results than the hypothesis that they are one." Plato has Socrates claim that Zeno and Parmenides were essentially arguing exactly the same point.
Zeno of Elea was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of Magna Graecia and a member of the Eleatic School founded by Parmenides. Aristotle called him the inventor of the dialectic. He is best known for his paradoxes, which Bertrand Russell described as "immeasurably subtle and profound".
Gilbreath's conjecture is a conjecture in number theory regarding the sequences generated by applying the forward difference operator to consecutive prime numbers and leaving the results unsigned, and then repeating this process on consecutive terms in the resulting sequence, and so forth. The statement is named after Norman L. Gilbreath who, in 1958, presented it to the mathematical community after observing the pattern by chance while doing arithmetic on a napkin. In 1878, eighty years before Gilbreath's discovery, François Proth had, however, published the same observations along with an attempted proof, which was later shown to be false.
Robert Berger is an applied mathematician, known for inventing the first aperiodic tiling using a set of 20,426 distinct tile shapes.
In mathematics, a square-free element is an element r of a unique factorization domain R that is not divisible by a non-trivial square. This means that every s such that is a unit of R.
In mathematics the Padovan cuboid spiral is the spiral created by joining the diagonals of faces of successive cuboids added to a unit cube. The cuboids are added sequentially so that the resulting cuboid has dimensions that are successive Padovan numbers.
In English and related languages, several terms involving the words "great" or "gross" (possibly, from French: grosse thick) relate to numbers involving a multiple of exponents of twelve (dozen):
David Darling is an English astronomer, freelance science writer, and musician. Darling has published numerous popular science works, including Life Everywhere: The Maverick Science of Astrobiology in 2001 and The Universal Book of Mathematics in 2004. He maintains the online Internet Encyclopedia of Science.
The lute of Pythagoras is a self-similar geometric figure made from a sequence of pentagrams.
In number theory, an extravagant number is a natural number in a given number base that has fewer digits than the number of digits in its prime factorization in the given number base. For example, in base 10, 4 = 2², 6 = 2×3, 8 = 2³, and 9 = 3² are extravagant numbers.
In number theory, an equidigital number is a natural number in a given number base that has the same number of digits as the number of digits in its prime factorization in the given number base, including exponents but excluding exponents equal to 1. For example, in base 10, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 10 are equidigital numbers. All prime numbers are equidigital numbers in any base.
In number theory, a frugal number is a natural number in a given number base that has more digits than the number of digits in its prime factorization in the given number base (including exponents). For example, in base 10, 125 = 53, 128 = 27, 243 = 35, and 256 = 28 are frugal numbers (sequence A046759 in the OEIS), and in base 2, thirty-two is a frugal number, since 100000 = 10101.
Ostomachion, also known as loculus Archimedius and also as syntomachion, is a mathematical treatise attributed to Archimedes. This work has survived fragmentarily in an Arabic version and a copy, the Archimedes Palimpsest, of the original ancient Greek text made in Byzantine times. The word Ostomachion has as its roots in the Greek Ὀστομάχιον, which means "bone-fight", from ὀστέον (osteon), "bone" and μάχη (mache), "fight, battle, combat". Note that the manuscripts refer to the word as "Stomachion", an apparent corruption of the original Greek. Ausonius gives us the correct name "Ostomachion". The Ostomachion which he describes was a puzzle similar to tangrams and was played perhaps by several persons with pieces made of bone. It is not known which is older, Archimedes' geometrical investigation of the figure, or the game. Victorinus, Bassus Ennodius and Lucretius have talked about the game too.
An alphamagic square is a magic square that remains magic when its numbers are replaced by the number of letters occurring in the name of each number. Hence 3 would be replaced by 5, the number of letters in "three". Since different languages will have a different number of letters for the spelling of the same number, alphamagic squares are language dependent. Alphamagic squares were invented by Lee Sallows in 1986.
Altekruse Puzzle is a puzzle invented by Austrian inventor William Altekruse.
A schizophrenic number is an irrational number that displays certain characteristics of rational numbers.
In geometry, Cayley's sextic is a plane curve, a member of the sinusoidal spiral family, first discussed by Colin Maclaurin in 1718. Arthur Cayley was the first to study the curve in detail and it was named after him in 1900 by Archibald.
Edward Mann Langley was a British mathematician, author of mathematical textbooks and founder of the Mathematical Gazette. He created the mathematical problem known as Langley’s Adventitious Angles.
Futility Closet is a blog, podcast, and database started in 2005 by editorial manager and publishing journalist Greg Ross. As of September 2017 the database totaled 9,840 items. They range over the fields of history, literature, language, art, philosophy, and recreational mathematics.
 | This article about a mathematical publication is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |