Description
Book SynopsisPresents a collection of essays written by a distinguished mathematician with a very long and successful career as a researcher and educator. The author writes about everything he found exciting about maths, its history, and its connections with art, and about how to explain it when so many smart people (and children) are turned off by it.
Table of Contents
- Opening more eyes to mathematics: How to get middle school students to love formulas & triangles
- Explaining Grothendieck to non-mathematicians
- Are mathematical formulas beautiful?
- The history of mathematics: Pythagoras's rule
- The checkered history of algebra
- Multi-culutural math history in five slides
- ""Modern"" art/""modern"" math and the Zeitgeist
- Interlude: Intelligent design in Orion?
- AI, neuroscience, and consciousness: Parse trees are ubiquitous in thinking
- Linking deep learning and cortical functions
- Does/can human consciousness exist in animals and robots?
- And now, some bits of real math: Finding the rhythms of the primes
- Spaces of shapes and rogue waves
- An applied mathematician's foundations of math
- Coming to terms with the quantum: Quantum theory and the mysterious collapse
- Path integrals and quantum computing
- Nothing is simple in the real world: Wake up!
- One world or many?
- Spinoza: Euclid, ethics, time
- Thoughts on the future
- Author's bibliography
- Bibliography
