This work talks about the logic of nature and the nature of logic. Like Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, and David Berlinski's "A Tour of the Calculus", "Euclid in the Rainforest" combines the literary with the mathematical to explore logic - the one indispensable tool in man's quest to und[...]
The fascinating story of an ancient riddle?and what it reveals about the nature of time and space
Three millennia ago, the Greek philosopher Zeno constructed a series of logical paradoxes to prove that motion is impossible. Today, these paradoxes remain on the cutting edge of our investigations[...]
Why do so many gamblers risk it all when they know the odds of winning are against them? Why do they believe dice are 'hot' in a winning streak? Why do we expect heads on a coin toss after several flips have turned up tails? "What's Luck Got to Do with It?" takes a lively and eye-opening look at the[...]
While all of us regularly use basic math symbols such as those for plus, minus, and equals, few of us know that many of these symbols weren't available before the sixteenth century. What did mathematicians rely on for their work before then? And how did mathematical notations evolve into what we kno[...]