Pluses and Minuses
How Maths Solves Our Problems
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
You look up from your phone for a moment to order an espresso. It’s made with one of those large stainless-steel coffee makers that heats the water until it’s precisely the right temperature. It keeps track of how fast the water warms up and uses that to calculate whether it needs to apply more or less heat, until the perfect temperature is attained. You’re not aware of any of it, but right in front of your nose those formulae that your maths teacher talked about are being used to make your cup of coffee.
Thousands of years ago, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia became the first humans to use numbers. Since then, mathematics has become an unstoppable force. It’s behind almost everything, from search engines to cruise control, from coffee-makers to timetables. But now that we hardly ever need to do arithmetic, how relevant is mathematics to everyday life?
Drawing on examples within the interconnected fields of philosophy, psychology and history, Dr Stefan Buijsman explores the role mathematics plays in the modern world.
Stefan Buijsman gained a master’s degree in philosophy in Leiden at the age of eighteen. He then moved to Sweden, where he gained his doctorate within eighteen months, making him one of the youngest ever PhDs. He is currently studying the philosophy of mathematics as a post-doctoral researcher.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Buijsman, a philosophy of mathematics wunderkind who earned his doctorate at age 20, delivers an illuminating history of mathematics that also touches on fascinating philosophical questions surrounding math. One of the central debates, he explains, is between those who contend numbers are a preexisting natural phenomenon waiting to be discovered and those who view them as a human-made set of principles with no intrinsic basis in reality. Buijusman doesn't subscribe to either position, holding that the question of why math works is still unresolved. He does have a major thesis about math, which is that its primary value lies in its ability to simplify reality, as he demonstrates with lucid and accessible descriptions of mathematical breakthroughs and their applications throughout history. These include the simultaneous invention of calculus by rival 17th-century mathematicians Newton and Leibniz; graph theory, which provides a fascinating look at the driving force behind web searches; and probability and statistics, which enable the art of polling. Buijsman's enjoyable survey makes a convincing argument that understanding these basics will provide the tools necessary to better evaluate the modern world's information onslaught.
