Visions of Infinity: The Great Mathematical Problems - Softcover

Stewart, Ian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0465064892 ISBN 13: 9780465064892

Publisher: Basic Books, 2014

Synopsis

Acclaimed writer and mathematician Ian Stewart investigates history's most important and elusive math problems
For every problem mathematicians solve, another awaits to perplex and galvanize them. Such challenges offer a tantalizing glimpse of the field's unlimited potential and keep mathematicians looking toward the horizons of intellectual possibility.
In Visions of Infinity, Ian Stewart explains why these problems exist, what drives mathematicians to solve them, and why their efforts matter in the context of science as a whole. Stewart describes solved problems as well as those like the P/NP problem, which could easily remain unproved for another hundred years.
An approachable and illuminating history of mathematics as told through fourteen of its greatest problems, Visions of Infinity reveals how mathematics the world over have risen to meet the challenges set by their predecessors-and how the enigmas of the past inevitably surrender to the powerful techniques of the present.

About this title

About the Author

Ian Stewart is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and active researcher at the University of Warwick. He is also a regular research visitor at the University of Houston, the Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications in Minneapolis, and the Santa Fe Institute. His writing has appeared in New Scientist, Discover, Scientific American, and many newspapers in the U.K. and U.S. He lives in Coventry, England.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Few of us share Stewart’s mathematical skills. But we relish the intellectual stimulation of joining him in exploring mathematical problems that have pushed even genius to the limit. We thrill, for instance, to the ingenuity of a great Chinese mathematician coming tantalizingly close to proving the centuries-old Goldbach Conjecture. And we feel the human meaning of mathematical achievement when a triumphant British analyst weeps before television cameras after finally proving a seventeenth-century algebraic theorem. We feel that meaning again when a brilliant Russian mathematician retreats into reclusive isolation, distressed because of initial skepticism toward his groundbreaking work on a nineteenth-century riddle. But high-level mathematics stirs deep emotions largely because it taps into the mind’s deepest impulses. Stewart repeatedly shows how a trivial mathematical curiosity can open up vital new conceptual insights. Readers learn, for example, that the apparently inconsequential four-color problem has led investigators deep into theoretical physics and has compelled fundamental rethinking of what constitutes a mathematical proof in a computerized age. Proofs incorporating computer-generated calculations may strike old-school mathematicians as unsatisfying, but Stewart assures readers that mathematics still depends on human investigators and that such investigators will not soon run out of daunting mathematical problems. A bracing mental workout for amateur mathematicians. --Bryce Christensen

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0465064892
• ISBN 13: 9780465064892
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352