Brain-melting mathematics

Anything by Paul Davies is pretty cool although he is more physics than maths, but maths is in there. The ones I would recommend are his books "the last three minutes", "how to build a time machine" and "about time" if you think maths is freaky check out the last book as time is something else !. I guarantee when you read this you will never look at time in the same way again.

If you like reading about mathmatical formulae then check out bernuolli. His formulae relate to pressure and velocity and are used in all industries dealing with fluids.

I am a great beleiver in teaching maths as a practical subject. If you are going to teach kids abstract algebra then you should also tell them about the myriad of applications it has in the real world.

Originally Posted by MeridiaNx

Read the God Delusion though, good book if you can take some of the more ranty portions with a pinch of salt.

He's a very interesting man but I know what you mean, it does get wearing at times; especially as he's preaching to the converted. I can't imagine anyone religous reading it at all. I suggest 'why god is not great' as a better read.

Originally Posted by dizzyblonde

try....C.F.D and F.E.A. computational, fluid, dynamics and finite element analysis.
I don't know what it is but Im Indoors studies it amongst other things. Last year i had many a book of this subject thrown at me during his third year at uni. Made my eyes go square followed by a long period of zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

CFD and FEA has a nice mathmatical flow to it if you're mathmatically minded. You want to try flight dynamics, you've suddenly got an extra 3 axes to deal with on top of it all

Originally Posted by the_lone_wolf

i can recommend "In Search Of Schroedinger's Cat" by John Gribbin

Did he look on the window sill in the spare bedroom? I find mine's always there.


HTH

Originally Posted by Rog

I am a great beleiver in teaching maths as a practical subject. If you are going to teach kids abstract algebra then you should also tell them about the myriad of applications it has in the real world.

+1 to that ... that's what makes Maths sooooooo interesting.

I'm quite interested in maths and that book in the OP looks quite intriguing (in a geeky sorta way ).

I used to do a bit of tutoring in GCSE maths ... I was amazed at how much I remembered 10 years on! Matrices, pythagoras' theorem, differentiation (calculus). I had a brilliant maths teacher (immortalised in the speccy game - Manic Miner - Dr Jones' Math Room!). I could pretty much do the maths, but I didn't put a lot of effort into it ... so after my mock exams, I'm sure he intentionally marked me down a grade and said, "you'll be lucky to get that in your O-level exam - if you really TRY - but in all honesty I can only see you getting a C!".
I thought, "I'll show you!" ... so I revised damned hard, and got an A
On the day I collected my results he was in the school admin office and I said, "Hey, Doc Jones, I got an A in maths!" ... he said, "Yeah, well done, I knew you would" damned reverse psychology!
I went on to do A-level maths, but lost interest in it after he left the school to go back to work in industry, and eventually failed the exams. The other teachers just didn't have the motivational skills or the ability to make the topic interesting

Oh god, I love brain achy stuff. Not very good at it mind

Personally I still struggle with Einstein's two relativity theories. I can accept them, and even understand them, but actually internalising them, getting them "in my head" if that makes sense - I only get that eureka moment every now and again, then I always later lose it and struggle again.

Another good one to ponder over is predicting prime numbers. On the face of it prime numbers appear to be a creation of maths, therefore there must be a mathematical way to predict them. But there's not. It's kind like the "what's the next number in this sequence" puzzles, except no-one's cracked this one - 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 - what comes next (it's 19 - but where's the pattern, why can't that be predicted?)

Originally Posted by MiniMatt

It's kind like the "what's the next number in this sequence" puzzles, except no-one's cracked this one - 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 - what comes next (it's 19 - but where's the pattern, why can't that be predicted?)

Yeah that one cropped up in the book too. And another one I liked posed the problem of whether any map could be drawn which required more than 4 colours to shade it, such that no two areas sharing a common border were shaded the same colour.

[timwilky]

For some crazy reason I did an additional maths options at uni. Which was helpful as I was there through an ONC route instead of traditional A levels.

So those with a phyics/maths A levels used to struggle with some stuff, especially Thermodynamics, fluids and even general mechanics, such as Coriollis, Castigliano etc. I found it "Interesting".

However, I never could get my head round Fourier transforms etc.


Crazy friend did his maths degree part time and took it through to a full PHD still part time all based of Steiner triple series mathematical quirks. Now that is brain ache stuff

I got a C.S.E. grade 4 in maths in '76' ( which is why Im driving a truck on the night shift and not head of theoretical astrophysics at cornell like I was planning) so feel eminitely qualified to add to this debate try 'parallel worlds' by michio kaku for a bit of light reading or 'Chaos : making a new sceince' by James Gleick.

I had a problem at school where, when I chose to do Physics AS, I got put in the top set. Not meaning to blow my own trumpet or anything, but I was always in the top set for everything so they did it automatically. Problem was, I ended up as the only AS student in the class, doing English, History & Economics as my main subjects. The rest of the class were all full A-level students, half of them Chinese, and all of them doing Physics, Maths, Further Maths & Electronics.

I was a little out of my depth!

yeah i used to think i was good at maths until i took a mathsy option too far at uni and ended up WAAAY out of my depth with all the egg heads!!

I still have nightmares about those text books now...