Description
Book SynopsisMove over, Sherlock and Watson--the detective duo to be reckoned with. In the entertaining short-story collection L.A. Math, freelance investigator Freddy Carmichael and his sidekick, Pete Lennox, show how math smarts can crack even the most perplexing cases. Freddy meets colorful personalities throughout Los Angeles and encounters mysterious circu
Trade Review"Fun for any crime-fiction lover who fancies a spot of mathematical adventuring, or vice versa."--Brian Clegg, Popular Science blog "James D Stein ... explains in the preface to the book that entertaining stories set in Los Angeles, with mathematics squeezed painlessly in, was his long cherished dream of a way to teach basic math as fun rather than a chore ... a book to teach math to non-science students at university."--S. Ananthanarayanan, The Statesman "If you liked the Numb3rs TV show: L.A. Math: Romance, Crime, and Mathematics in the City of Angels by James D. Stein."--John Allen Paulos, author of A Numerate Life "A former maths professor has turned detective to demonstrate just how useful--and how entertaining--his subject can be."--Matthew Reiz, Times Higher Education "With tight and engaging plots, the stories in LA Math are neatly written and just the right length to read in around 15 minutes."--Dominic Lenton, Engineering & Technology
Table of ContentsPREFACE: L.A. Math ix MATHEMATICAL TOPICS BY CHAPTER xv CHAPTER 1. A Change of Scene 1 CHAPTER 2. The Case of the Vanishing Greenbacks 11 CHAPTER 3. A Matter of Time 21 CHAPTER 4. The Worst Forty Days since the Flood 31 CHAPTER 5. The Accidental Guest 40 CHAPTER 6. Message from a Corpse 50 CHAPTER 7. Animal Passions 60 CHAPTER 8. Nothing to Crow About 69 CHAPTER 9. The Winning Streak 78 CHAPTER 10. One Long Season 88 CHAPTER 11. The Great Basketball Fix 97 CHAPTER 12. It's All in the Game 106 CHAPTER 13. Division of Labor 115 CHAPTER 14. The Quarterback Controversy 123 APPENDIXES: Continuing the Investigations 1. Mathematical Logic in "A Change of Scene" 137 2. Percentages in "The Case of the Vanishing Greenbacks" 143 3. Averages and Rates in "A Matter of Time" 148 4. Sequences and Arithmetic Progressions in "The Worst Forty Days since the Flood" 153 5. Algebra, the Language of Quantitative Relationships, in "The Accidental Guest" 161 6. Mathematics of Finance in "Message from a Corpse" 166 7. Set Theory in "Animal Passions" 175 8. The Chinese Restaurant Principle: Combinatorics in "Nothing to Crow About" 184 9. Probability and Expectation in "The Winning Streak" 189 10. Conditional Probability in "One Long Season" 198 11. Statistics in "The Great Basketball Fix" 202 12. Game Theory in "It's All in the Game" 213 13. Elections in "Division of Labor" 219 14. Algorithms, Efficiency, and Complexity in "The Quarterback Controversy" 225 An Introduction to Sports Betting 231 Notes 235 Index 239
