Mathematics: A Practical Odyssey

Emphasizing the practical applications and the history of mathematics, MATHEMATICS: A PRACTICAL ODYSSEY illustrates to students how mathematics is relevant to their education, human history, and culture. Johnson and Mowry effectively demonstrate how learning the algebraic concepts presented allows students to understand more about logic, probability, statistics, finance, geometry, matrices, logarithms, calculus, and many other topics.

David Johnson earned a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and a Bachelor's degree in Psychology (with an emphasis on Learning Theory), from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and a Master's degree in Mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley. After several years working as an academic counselor at Berkeley, he became a Professor of Mathematics at Diablo Valley College (DVC). He has taught DVC's liberal arts math course regularly for about 25 years, using Mathematics a Practical Odyssey. Other favorite courses include Intermediate Algebra, all three semesters of Calculus, and Differential Equations.

Thomas Mowry earned a Bachelor's degree and a Master's degree in Mathematics from Michigan Technological University, in Houghton, Michigan. He began his college teaching career at City College of San Francisco and then went on to teach at San Francisco State University, Golden Gate University, and Cogswell College. He has been a professor of mathematics at Diablo Valley College, Pleasant Hill, California since 1985, where he has taught the complete gamut of courses from arithmetic to differential equations. He has served as department chair at DVC for the last seven years. Along with co-author, David Johnson, he created a college-level, transferable mathematics course (at DVC ) designed for students in the liberal arts. As no appropriate textbooks were available for this course, he and David created Mathematics: A Practical Odyssey, which was first published in 1992.