Is maths making you miserable? Are you scared of squares and perplexed by primes? Do numbers leave you...non-plussed? Then it's time to be utterly amazed, as you're whisked off to infinity and back with Numbers: The Key to the Universe. Find out how you could win a million dollars and become famous for ever (twice), discover the key to the evil Professor's Fiendish Number Chain, and travel to a distant planet for the biggest gig in all eternity. Meanwhile, things get ugly when the gangsters meet the unlucky number 13. Guarantee: This book contains no nasty exercises and no boring sums!
Find out how to escape the evil clutches of Professor Fiendish, why maths could save us from the destruction of life on Earth, and meet Pythagoras, who got so upset about maths that he murdered someone. Plus, One Finger Jimmy and the rest of the gang are here to show how dangerous maths can be.
The Most Epic Book of Maths EVER (formerly The Murderous Maths of Everything) is one big book with (nearly) all the answers to everything in maths EVER. Readers can join the cast of crazy characters on a tour of the Murderous Maths building to discover the darkest and deadliest mathematical secrets, including: a sure-fire way how to make birthdays last twice as long, how the number 1 starts fights, how triangles lead to murder, and much more. Maths has never been so much fun!
Does probability make you panic? Do you ever feel you don't fancy your chances? This title will show you why coins have no memory, and whether Urgum the Axeman is likely to lose his head and join Riverboat Lil and Brett Shuffler in a mathematical tangle with swamp snakes.
How can you make a liar tell the truth? How many people in the world share your birthday? Easy Questions, Evil Answers provides the answers to these questions and more. It's the perfect read for anyone who's ever wondered just how many footballs you can fit in a swimming pool and how long it takes to count to a million.
For readers traumatised by triangles and anxious about angles, the next in the unchallenged Murderous Maths series, The Fiendish Angletron unveils the tools to solve even the most testing of trigonomogeometric tasks. Here to help are some strangely familiar superheroes Supersin, Cosgirl and Tandog. Using a host of hilarious characters, Kjartan Poskitt presents all the tricks, tips and shortcuts to maths they don't teach at school.
In the wrong hands, math can be deadly. Even the simplest numbers can become powerful forces when manipulated by politicians or the media, but in the case of the law, your liberty -- and your life -- can depend on the right calculation. In Math on Trial, mathematicians Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez describe ten trials spanning from the nineteenth century to today, in which mathematical arguments were used -- and disastrously misused -- as evidence. They tell the stories of Sally Clark, who was accused of murdering her children by a doctor with a faulty sense of calculation; of nineteenth-century tycoon Hetty Green, whose dispute over her aunt's will became a signal case in the forensic use of mathematics; and of the case of Amanda Knox, in which a judge's misunderstanding of probability led him to discount critical evidence -- which might have kept her in jail. Offering a fresh angle on cases from the nineteenth-century Dreyfus affair to the murder trial of Dutch nurse Lucia de Berk, Schneps and Colmez show how the improper application of mathematical concepts can mean the difference between walking free and life in prison. A colorful narrative of mathematical abuse, Math on Trial blends courtroom drama, history, and math to show that legal expertise isn't't always enough to prove a person innocent.
A humorous look at the world of numbers, covering topics number systems, such as place values, fractions, prime numbers, and their uses. Suggested level: intermediate, junior secondary.
Using a host of hilarious characters, Kjartan Poskitt presents all the tricks, tips and shortcuts to statistics they don't teach at school. Readers will find out how fractions can save them from the toxic mutant fish of Fastbuck, what makes Pongo McWhiffy a mathematical freak, and travel to Planet Mean to discover how averages can be absolutely revolting. Guarantee: this book contains absolutely no sums!
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
