Instant Mathematics, but just a taste

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I just finished reading this book that gives you 'bite sized' introductions to various concepts in mathematics as well as the people behind them.

Instant Mathematics

I have always been interested in mathematics (maths in the UK, but math in the US for some reason). I remember being put in the advanced class in primary school and I carried it through to A level as well as parts of my electrical engineering degree. That is not to say it always came easily to me. I found some of the advanced topics really hard. I have not really kept up my studies, but have used parts of it at various times. I got into fractals which use complex numbers and cryptography that uses prime numbers. There have also been times when I needed some geometry. Of course a lot of this related to my programming work and hobbies. Languages like Python have a lot of powerful facilities for mathematics, but you still need to understand the principles.

The book covers everything from basic counting to the latest work in data science. Discoveries are still being made, but most of the simple problems were solved long ago and the field is too wide for anyone to cover it all.

Example pages

There is not a huge amount of text, but it is more about bullet points than long explanations. A lot of use is made of diagrams and colour.

More examples

I was bought this as a present and may not have bought it myself, but I did enjoy it and learnt a few things. You would need to find other books to go deeper into any of the topics.

The short biographies of mathematicians are fascinating. Many did their best work when young and some did not live too long. There are a few women in there despite them being excluded from a lot of formal education through history. What struck me was the number of Jewish mathematicians who had to flee their country of birth. Those countries lost out, but then discrimination based on race or culture is illogical.

I logged this read on GoodReads. I have been using that site for about ten years now. I used some other book sites before, but this one offered more facilities. I have wondered if someone could implement something similar on the blockchain. There are challenges in creating entries for every book out there as there can be many editions of each. On Hive you could have a page per book with comments used for reviews, but it needs someone to have responsibility for compiling the data. Any open platform is vulnerable to abuse.

Another 'life logging' service I have used is last.fm (formerly Audioscrobbler) that logs music listening. I have used that for nineteen years when I have listened to well over 100k tracks. That is automated as the apps I use send each play to the site. I know some people moved to more open source versions, but I just never got around to that and it would mean some tweaks to how I log. This is something else that could be on a blockchain, but could something like Hive handle the quantity of data? last.fm is probably tracking millions of plays each day. I like being able to see the statistics on what I have been listening to. This is different to books as I will only read most of those once and only get through a few each year.

Happy reading.



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34 comments
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Wow! It was great to know this through you post , thanks for sharing

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That looks quite interesting. I might give it a bash. I do like a bit of math but seem to have forgotten most of it

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A lot of it I never used again, but I've been programming all this time and various things come into that. I disagree with Sunak that everyone needs to to maths until 18, but we need a good grounding in the basics like probability, percentages and statistics that come up in the news all the time.

I used to do some programming challenges. Some of those involved big prime numbers and Python makes that easier as integers can be as long as you like.

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Those three are definietly the ones that are lacking. People these days have no critical ability with statistics and percentages

I need to get started with Python again. I was doing it as part of my self allocated training in work but then all of the work stuff got mental and our training fell away

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I use Python all the time at work. I still have plenty to learn about it.

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I would've liked to read a book like that while I was in high school. I kept my math book for the final year, and it starts every chapter with calculations. Barely a sentence explaining the theory. No wonder I was always thinking "What is this and why are we doing it this way?" And that was the easy version, as preparation for the social sciences.

Later I taught myself imaginary numbers after I read a remark about the square root of - 1. It's such a wonderful concept!

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I think it's vital to understand where things come from so you can prove concepts to yourself. Learning should not just be about memorising things.

Imaginary/complex numbers crop up a lot. It takes a certain mind to make that leap to something different. We should celebrate mathematicians more.

!BEER

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Tempted! I found maths fairly easy at school until I did my degree in software engineering, the maths module for that was, ooh! A tough one!

So maths does play a part in my life. Remember music is in many ways, maths!

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Some of the maths in my degree was really hard for me, but it has applications. Now I am back in an engineering industry, so it can come up again.

Music is all about fractions and ratios, but also about feel.

!BEER

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By reading such near books we benefit a lot and get a lot of good knowledge.

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I was a math minor for a while in college, but I wouldn't say I was really that great at it. I went as far as calc 3 and that was about it. This reminds me of the CBT Nuggets site that splits tech stuff up into bite sized chunks that are easy to learn.

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I don't think everyone has the mind for the complex stuff, but too many people are scared of numbers. It helps to have a good teacher and/or books.

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Yeah, having a good teacher is good. I remember for those higher level classes a group of us students would meet together every day and go through it all together.

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I like that they gave brief insights on the different mathematicians, makes it more interesting. Just reading about lots of theromd and not practicing it would be a bit of a struggle. I prefer the practical approach to maths . We also say maths here in South Africa!

!PIZZA

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There have been some movies about mathematicians like A Beautiful Mind and Hidden Figures. It doesn't have to be boring, but it can be at school.

!BEER

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This is cool
I have always disliked Mathematics. Hahaha
I didn't know it
It is the hardest subject I have ever done

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The world runs on maths, including Hive, so it's useful to understand some of it.

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Core that looks like a great book, I just started working through some AS material on maths, surprised to find a (relatively small) chunk of it is about stats, and much more sociological than I thought.

It's not necessarily useful in itself, what is useful is training the brain to be logical and precise, which is very useful!

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I have a load of 'popular science' books and I enjoy those. I even have a graphic novel about mathematics. Dry text books can be hard work, but the right writer can make the topic entertaining as well as educational.

My statistics knowledge is a little lacking. There's lots you can do these days with big data sets, e.g. from Hive. Data science is a hot topic.

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This reminds me when I last use my knowledge of Math. I needed to calculate the coefficient of change in the proportion of the ingredients of the pie, if the diameter of the baking form is not 26 cm, but 28 😁

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So did you use pi for the pie? Cooking can involve a few sums if you need to adjust the recipe.

There used to be some cool TV shows about maths when I was a kid. I expect kids get that from Youtube these days.

Volume of a !PIZZA with radius z and thickness a is pizza.

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Pi for a pie 🙂
I guess you need a !BEER for the pizza

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I have always been one who loved numbers, I guess that's why I love doing bookkeeping! LOL

I had a similar book that went through the basics of various parts of math, but no history was included.

I had to be patient with my children when teaching them math (I homeschooled my children), because while I could "see" it, they took much longer at seeing it. I kept thinking, "How do you not see it, it's so clear!" I had to find a curriculum that taught me how to teach the concepts so they could understand. My husband would overhear us from time to time and he would tell me later, "Wow! I didn't know that was why (whatever) works. Now that I know it makes it so much easier to understand AND use."

That's the issue, with so much abstractness in math, if someone doesn't grasp the why behind it, it takes so much longer for them to "get it." That's why a switch in curriculum worked for us - my teaching and my children's learning.

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I tried to help my kids with their homework, but they were taught different methods for multiplication and division, so I did not want to confuse them. They did not take to maths or computers as I did, but are doing their own things.

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LOL, I didn't know there was a different method to doing multiplication. I remember my oldest (when she was young) came home from church one night and said to me, "I don't want to learn multiplication." I asked her why and she said that the kids at church said it was hard.

I told her to let me know how difficult it is when we get to it. Little did she know that she was already doing multiplication, since she was learning skip-counting as she was learning addition. When she got to multiplication, she said, "Wow! I already know this, it's easy!" That was the difference between my learning and my children's. When my son was three, he kept singing those little skip counting songs his older sister was learning, so he got quite a bit of a head start!

My children learned math, because I believed it to be important, but they didn't take to it, and didn't go as far with it. That's ok. I told them they had to go through geometry and algebra 2. All four of them didn't go any further than that, because they didn't want to. However, they all saw the importance of it and they see how much they use what they learned in math in everyday life.

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They did the grid method whereas I did standard 'long' multiplication. Mind you, I was learning that nearly 50 years ago! I'm old :)

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I'm old, too (I graduated high school in 1976). I didn't know anything about the "grid method" until I followed your link. However, when I showed my children how to multiply, we used blocks so they could SEE why it worked. I guess it's a bit like the grid method, but I taught them the standard long multiplication once they understood how/why it worked.

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looks like a very well done book. I too might think about buying a math book next time

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