Brand New Book: Coming Home to Math: Become Comfortable with the Numbers that Rule Your Life, by Irving P. Herman (World Scientific, 2020)
https://doi.org/10.1142/11540, ISBN: 978-981-120-984-0 (hardcover); 978-981-121-126-3 (softcover)
We live in a world of numbers and mathematics, and so we need to work with numbers and some math in almost everything we do, to control our happiness and the direction of our lives. The purpose of Coming Home to Math is to make adults with little technical training more comfortable with math, in using it and enjoying it, and to allay their fears of math, enable their numerical thinking, and convince them that math is fun. A range of important math concepts are presented and explained in simple terms, mostly by using arithmetic, with frequent connections to the real world of personal financial matters, health, gambling, and popular culture.
As such, Coming Home to Math is geared to making the general, non-specialist, adult public more comfortable with math, though not to formally train them for new careers or to teach those first learning math. It may also be helpful to liberal arts college students who need to tackle more technical subjects. The range of topics covered may also appeal to scholars who are more math savvy, though it may not challenge them. See problems and solutions at http://www.irvingpherman.com/coming-home-to-math/.
Contents:
Preface
Our World of Math and Numbers:
- Introduction
- We Use Numbers Here, There and Everywhere
- Numbers Are Some of My Favorite Things
The First World of Math: The Eternal Truths of Math:
- Linking Numbers: Operations on Numbers
- Words and Numbers: Being Careful
- Writing Really Big and Really Small Numbers, and Those In-between
- Touching All Bases, At Times with Logs
- Numbers Need to be Exact, But It Ain't Necessarily So
- The Different Types of Numbers Have Not Evolved, But Our Understanding of Them Has
- Really, Really Big and Really, Really Small Numbers
- The Whole Truth of Whole Numbers
The Second World of Math: The Math of Doing:
- The Math of the Digital World: Modular Arithmetic (or Using Number Leftovers)
- The Math of What Will Be: Progressions of Growth and Decay
- Untangling The Worlds of Probability and Statistics
- The Math of What Might Be: Probability — What Are the Odds?
- The Math of What Was: Statistics — The Good, The Bad, and The Evil
- The Math of Big Data
The Third World of Math: The Math of Making Decisions and Winning:
- The Math of Optimization, Ranking, Voting, and Allocation
- The Math of Gaming
- The Math of Risk
Closing Thoughts
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