The Math Book ePub PDF free download by Clifford A. Pickover

The Math Book ePub PDF free download by Clifford A. Pickover – Summarizing all of mathematics in one book is a daunting and indeed impossible task. Humankind has been exploring and discovering mathematics for millennia. Practically, we have relied on math to advance our species, with early arithmetic and geometry providing the foundations for the first cities and civilizations. And philosophically, we have used mathematics as an exercise in pure thought to explore patterns and logic. As a subject, mathematics is surprisingly hard to pin down with one catch-all definition. “Mathematics” is not simply, as many people think, “stuff to do with numbers.” That would exclude a huge range of mathematical topics, including much of the geometry and topology covered in this book. Of course, numbers are still very useful tools to understand even the most esoteric areas of mathematics, but the point is that they are not the most interesting aspect of it. Focusing just on numbers misses the forest for the threes. For the record, my own definition of math as “the sort of things that mathematicians enjoy doing,” while delightfully circular, is largely unhelpful. Big Ideas Simply Explained is actually not a bad definition. Mathematics could be seen as the attempt to find the simplest explanations for the biggest ideas. It is the endeavor of finding and summarizing patterns. Some of those patterns involve the practical triangles required to build pyramids and divide land; other patterns attempt to classify all of the 26 sporadic groups of abstract algebra. These are very different problems in terms of both usefulness and complexity, but both types of pattern have become the obsession of mathematicians throughout the ages.