Books
The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time
What is time? This question has fascinated philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists for thousands of years. Why does time seem to speed up with age? What is its connection with memory, anticipation, and sleep cycles?
Award‑winning author and mathematician Joseph Mazur provides an engaging exploration of how the understanding of time has evolved throughout human history and offers a compelling new vision, submitting that time lives within us. Our cells, he notes, have a temporal awareness, guided by environmental cues in sync with patterns of social interaction. Readers learn that, as a consequence of time's personal nature, a forty‑eight‑hour journey on the space shuttle can feel shorter than a six‑hour trip on the Soyuz capsule, that the Amondawa of the Amazon do not have ages, and that time speeds up with fever and slows down when we feel in danger.
With a narrative punctuated by personal stories of time's effects on truck drivers, Olympic racers, prisoners, and clockmakers, Mazur's journey is filled with fascinating insights into how our technologies, our bodies, and our attitudes can change our perceptions. Ultimately, time reveals itself as something that rides on the rhythms of our minds. The Clock Mirage presents an innovative perspective that will force us to rethink our relationship with time, and how best to use it.
Fluke: The Math and Myth of Coincidences
Enlightening Symbols: A short History of Mathematical Notation and its Hidden Powers
From words to abbreviations to symbols, this book examines how math evolved to the familiar forms we use today.
What's Luck Got To Do With It?
Centering on the general mathematics of gambling, primarily on probability and statistics through a simple tutorial on what probability and statistics are about, this book moves on to explain expected value, the law of large numbers, coincidences, distribution functions and the mathematics of decision making. And that will give a partial idea—the mathematical piece—of what luck in gambling really is. Internet gambling, along with the usual Internet risks, is now popular, along with reality TV shows such as Deal or No Deal, which counts on both the psychological makeup of the contestants as well as on how little those contestants know about the mathematics of decision-making. Greed and compulsivity are behind the essential entertainment factors of those shows. The psychology of the audiences and contestants is investigated along with the contestant’s mixed problems of greed and stardom craving. Some compound combination of greed, ignorance of expected value and moment-of-fame glory takes over. And this will supply the psychological answer to the question of what luck really is.
Ultimately, we begin to understand greed and luck in gambling as well as why people accept bets with negative expectation and finally answer the central question of the book from both mathematical and psychological positions—what makes us feel lucky in gambling?
Japanese translations of --
Euclid in The Rainforest
The Motion Paradox
Number: the Language of Science