PDF Download Imagining Numbers: (particularly the square root of minus fifteen), by Barry Mazur
Never ever mind if you do not have sufficient time to head to guide shop and hunt for the favourite book to read. Nowadays, the on-line book Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur is concerning offer convenience of reading practice. You may not should go outside to browse guide Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur Searching as well as downloading the e-book entitle Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur in this post will certainly provide you much better remedy. Yeah, on-line publication Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur is a sort of digital publication that you can get in the link download supplied.
Imagining Numbers: (particularly the square root of minus fifteen), by Barry Mazur
PDF Download Imagining Numbers: (particularly the square root of minus fifteen), by Barry Mazur
Exactly how if there is a website that enables you to look for referred book Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur from all over the globe publisher? Automatically, the website will be amazing finished. A lot of book collections can be located. All will certainly be so very easy without complex thing to move from website to site to get guide Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur really wanted. This is the website that will give you those assumptions. By following this website you can get lots varieties of publication Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur compilations from variations kinds of writer and publisher preferred in this world. The book such as Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur and also others can be acquired by clicking wonderful on web link download.
This publication Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur is expected to be among the most effective seller publication that will certainly make you really feel completely satisfied to get as well as review it for finished. As understood could usual, every book will have specific things that will certainly make someone interested a lot. Also it originates from the writer, type, material, and even the publisher. However, lots of people also take the book Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur based on the motif as well as title that make them amazed in. as well as below, this Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur is extremely recommended for you since it has intriguing title and theme to review.
Are you truly a fan of this Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur If that's so, why don't you take this book now? Be the first individual who such as and lead this publication Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur, so you could obtain the reason and also messages from this book. Never mind to be puzzled where to obtain it. As the other, we discuss the link to see and download the soft file ebook Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur So, you may not carry the published publication Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur everywhere.
The existence of the on the internet book or soft documents of the Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur will relieve people to obtain guide. It will certainly additionally save even more time to only browse the title or writer or publisher to obtain till your publication Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur is revealed. Then, you can visit the link download to check out that is offered by this website. So, this will certainly be a great time to begin enjoying this publication Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur to review. Always good time with publication Imagining Numbers: (particularly The Square Root Of Minus Fifteen), By Barry Mazur, always great time with cash to invest!
How the elusive imaginary number was first imagined, and how to imagine it yourself
Imagining Numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen) is Barry Mazur's invitation to those who take delight in the imaginative work of reading poetry, but may have no background in math, to make a leap of the imagination in mathematics. Imaginary numbers entered into mathematics in sixteenth-century Italy and were used with immediate success, but nevertheless presented an intriguing challenge to the imagination. It took more than two hundred years for mathematicians to discover a satisfactory way of "imagining" these numbers.
With discussions about how we comprehend ideas both in poetry and in mathematics, Mazur reviews some of the writings of the earliest explorers of these elusive figures, such as Rafael Bombelli, an engineer who spent most of his life draining the swamps of Tuscany and who in his spare moments composed his great treatise "L'Algebra". Mazur encourages his readers to share the early bafflement of these Renaissance thinkers. Then he shows us, step by step, how to begin imagining, ourselves, imaginary numbers.
- Sales Rank: #2018083 in Books
- Published on: 2003
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .91" h x 5.34" w x 7.88" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 270 pages
From Scientific American
Mazur, a mathematician and university professor at Harvard University, writes "for people who have no training in mathematics and who may not have actively thought about mathematics since high school, or even during it, but who may wish to experience an act of mathematical imagining and to consider how such an experience compares with the imaginative work involved in reading and understanding a phrase in a poem." It is a stimulating and challenging journey, one likely to lead the reader to share Mazur's view: "The great glory of mathematics is its durative nature; that it is one of humankind's longest conversations; that it never finishes by answering some questions and taking a bow. Rather, mathematics views its most cherished answers only as springboards to deeper questions."
Editors of Scientific American
Review
"A clear, accessible, beautifully written introduction not only to imaginary numbers, but to the role of imagination in mathematics."
-George Lakoff, Professor of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley
"This absorbing and in itself most imaginative book lies in the grand tradition of explanations of what mathematical imagination is--such as those of Hogben, Kasner and Newman, and Polya's How to Solve It. But it is unique in its understanding of and appeal to poetic thought and its analogues, and will appeal particularly to lovers of literature."
-John Hollander
"A very compelling, thought-provoking, and even drmataic description of what it means to think mathematically."
-Joseph Dauben, Professor of History and History of Science, City University of New York
"Barry Mazur’s Imagining Numbers is quite literally a charming book; it has brought even me, in a dazed state, to the brink of mathematical play."
-Richard Wilbur, author of Mayflies: New Poems and Translations
About the Author
Barry Mazur does his mathematics at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachussetts, with the writer Grace Dane Mazur.
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
More than just math - yet not interesting
By Steve Morin
I have read a few math books, prime obsession most recently, and this book wasn't technically very interesting, it also wasn't fun to read either. There are some good parts at the very beginning and end but middle is incoherently dry. Basically I believe that in some ways the way the author was trying to thought provoking and intelectual is where it lost it's was. Neither technical, historical, or fun enough you lost your audience
34 of 37 people found the following review helpful.
Not for math geeks
By A Customer
This isn't a book for people whose sole focus is mathematics. In fact, it's a book for those who are interested in the imagination and all of its works: poems, novels, paintings, music, and yes, mathematical concepts and ideas. The central question of the book is simply "what happens when we imagine something?" By way of shedding some light on that question, Mazur explores the slow, tentative process by which mathematicians came to feel that they had an adequate picture of what such a number as the square root of -15 actually is.
There is a lot of good history of mathematics here. Mazur has done his homework, and at times he departs from the received wisdom among historians because his reading of the primary sources has convinced him otherwise. He displays his erudition as lightly as possible, however, which makes it easy to miss the fact that some of the interpretations are in fact novel. Folks interested in the history of how complex numbers came to be accepted as honest-to-goodness numbers should definitely read this book.
And finally, this is a book that gives us a chance to see a great mind in action. It feels as if we have been invited to the author's house and we are sharing in a relaxed and rambling after-dinner conversation in which Mazur, one of the world's greatest living mathematicians, explains to his guests how it is that imagining numbers is like imagining the yellow of a tulip. Anyone in his right mind, had they a chance to actually go to Mazur's house and have this conversation, would be crazy to miss the opportunity. We can't have Mazur in person, but here he is on the page, and it's a pleasure to get to know him.
18 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
A disjointed book
By Dan Taflin
I read this book during the leisure time of a vacation, when I could have spent hours on tangents if the situation called for it. In fact, I did take the time to do some of the calculations suggested in the text. Unfortunately, despite its moments of brilliance, I did not find the book in general suitable for leisurely contemplation, but found myself racing toward the conclusion and both relieved and disappointed when I reached it.
Mazur is trying very hard to reach the liberal arts audience. To that end, he throws in piles of philosophical speculations, with copious references to classical works. That in itself is not a fault; but the execution of it is awkward. He slavishly alternates mathematical teaching with philosophical speculation, thus destroying any sense of continuity in the narrative. I found myself skipping the "liberal arts" portions so I could continue the thread of mathematical reasoning without interruption.
He is at his best when he introduces the complex plane. Its connection with rotation is beautifully made, and is the one piece of "new" information I took from the book. I wish he had emphasized more the "Fundamental Theorem of Algebra," which shows how inclusion of imaginary numbers completes the theory of solutions of algebraic equations, but I won't quibble about that.
In the end, I must conclude that Mazur's goal of helping us imagine what must have been in the minds of the inventors/discoverers of imaginary numbers is a failure. Less philosophy and more history would have been a better path to that end. I would love to read what mathematicians themselves were thinking and saying about this new theory as it was being developed, but there is precious little of that.
Imagining Numbers: (particularly the square root of minus fifteen), by Barry Mazur PDF
Imagining Numbers: (particularly the square root of minus fifteen), by Barry Mazur EPub
Imagining Numbers: (particularly the square root of minus fifteen), by Barry Mazur Doc
Imagining Numbers: (particularly the square root of minus fifteen), by Barry Mazur iBooks
Imagining Numbers: (particularly the square root of minus fifteen), by Barry Mazur rtf
Imagining Numbers: (particularly the square root of minus fifteen), by Barry Mazur Mobipocket
Imagining Numbers: (particularly the square root of minus fifteen), by Barry Mazur Kindle
No comments:
Post a Comment