Mathematics Minus Fear: How to Make Math Fun and Beneficial to Your Everyday Life - Hardcover

Potter, Lawrence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1605983764 ISBN 13: 9781605983769

Publisher: Pegasus Books, 2012

Synopsis

Forget your classroom nightmares and discover how numbers can enhance and illuminate your world!

How can math help you bet on horses or win in Vegas? What’s the foolproof way to solve Sudoku? How can probability teach you to calculate your chances of survival in Russian roulette?           

In this irreverent and entertaining guide to mathematics, Lawrence Potter takes the fear out of everything from long division to percentages. Using fascinating puzzles and surprising examples, from M.C. Escher to Pascal, he shows us how math is connected with the world we encounter every day, from how the VAT works to why weather forecasts are wrong, from winning at Monopoly to improving your mental arithmetic. Along the way you’ll also discover who invented numbers, whether animals can count, and what nuns have to do with multiplication.

About this title

About the Author

Lawrence Potter attended Oxford University and graduated with a degree in classics  before becoming an adventurous mathematics teacher in Romania and Rwanda. He is the author of This May Help You Understand the World and lives in London.

Reviews

As a smart shopper watches her purchases traverse the supermarket conveyor belt, how can she accurately estimate her total costs? This question provides Potter with an occasion for illustrating the usefulness of mathematics in ordinary situations. Other cases pop up in throwing dice, assessing weather forecasts, and sizing up the wardrobe possibilities within a closet. Potter tirelessly demonstrates just how enjoyable and productive math can be! Laced with puckish humor, the lucid and even entertaining narrative eases readers past the anxieties associated with decimals and fractions, probabilities and proportions, algebra and formulas. After sharpening their skills on the brainteasers sprinkled throughout the text and trying out the Sudoku tricks Potter shares, readers are primed to tackle real-world numerical tasks. And Potter embeds such tasks in an exciting mathematical history running through Laplace, Fermat, Pascal, Viète—and the nameless pioneers of early Hindu and Arabic theorizing. Except perhaps for those reckless enough to test Potter’s strategy for Russian roulette, this book will turn mathematics into a long-lasting intellectual adventure. --Bryce Christensen

Edition details

• Publisher: Pegasus Books
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1605983764
• ISBN 13: 9781605983769
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416