Cutting Through the Knot is a humorous coming of age story, told in a conversational first person voice, recounting a young man's trials in overcoming mental illness. A novel of New York City in the 1980's, the narrative follows the adventures of a student on a leave of absence from a university in the north east. At the heart of novel is the protagonist's sense of humor. The title alludes to his psychiatrist's emphasis on the importance of laughter in the face of pain and struggle. Humor, he tells his young patient, cuts through the knot. This story is compelling, and disturbing, fascinating and frightening, enlightening and humorous...perhaps the first book that laid bare the emotional rollercoaster that many in this situation ride. Midwest Book Review
He who untied the Gordian knot would rule all of Asia So goes the legend of the tricky knot of Gordius, king of Phrygia.Many had tried; many had failed, but Alexander the Great simplycut the knot with his sword. He went on to conquer most of Asia, eventually reaching as far east as Northern India. Cut the Knot is a book of probability riddles curated to challenge the mind andexpand mathematical and logical thinking skills. First housed on cut-the-knot.org, these puzzles and their solutions represent the efforts of great minds around theworld. Follow along as Alexander Bogomolny presents these selected riddles bytopical progression. Try them for yourself before reading their solutions. Just like itwas for Alexander the Great, the non-trivial, unexpected solution might be exactlythe one you need.
The second edition of this atlas has been fully updated to give a step by step guide to facial nerve surgery. Beginning with an introduction to the anatomy and neurophysiology of the facial nerve and nerve regeneration, the text then discusses surgery for a range of conditions including Bell’s palsy, hemi facial spasm and tumours causing facial palsy. The atlas contains more than 300 intra-operative photographs and numerous illustrations of the facial nerve and its various anatomical and physiological features. Two interactive DVDs illustrating different aspects of facial nerve surgery, for a range of conditions and disorders, are also included.
Knots are familiar objects. Yet the mathematical theory of knots quickly leads to deep results in topology and geometry. This work offers an introduction to this theory, starting with our understanding of knots. It presents the applications of knot theory to modern chemistry, biology and physics.
The selections from 132 authors in this anthology represent gender, social class, and racial and national origin as inclusively as possible, providing both greater context for canonical works and a sense of the era’s richness and diversity. In terms of genre, poetry, non-fiction prose, philosophy, educational writing, and prose fiction are included. Geographically, America, Canada, Australia, India, and Africa are represented along with Britain, emphasizing Romantic literature as a world literature. Biographical headnotes, explanatory footnotes, and an extensive bibliography clarify and illuminate the texts for readers.
Doing Mathematics discusses some ways mathematicians and mathematical physicists do their work and the subject matters they uncover and fashion. The conventions they adopt, the subject areas they delimit, what they can prove and calculate about the physical world, and the analogies they discover and employ, all depend on the mathematics — what will work out and what won't. The cases studied include the central limit theorem of statistics, the sound of the shape of a drum, the connections between algebra and topology, and the series of rigorous proofs of the stability of matter. The many and varied solutions to the two-dimensional Ising model of ferromagnetism make sense as a whole when they are seen in an analogy developed by Richard Dedekind in the 1880s to algebraicize Riemann's function theory; by Robert Langlands' program in number theory and representation theory; and, by the analogy between one-dimensional quantum mechanics and two-dimensional classical statistical mechanics. In effect, we begin to see 'an identity in a manifold presentation of profiles,' as the phenomenologists would say.This second edition deepens the particular examples; it describe the practical role of mathematical rigor; it suggests what might be a mathematician's philosophy of mathematics; and, it shows how an 'ugly' first proof or derivation embodies essential features, only to be appreciated after many subsequent proofs. Natural scientists and mathematicians trade physical models and abstract objects, remaking them to suit their needs, discovering new roles for them as in the recent case of the Painlevé transcendents, the Tracy-Widom distribution, and Toeplitz determinants. And mathematics has provided the models and analogies, the ordinary language, for describing the everyday world, the structure of cities, or God's infinitude.
