Read more
How to Free Your Inner Mathematician delivers engaging mathematical content and provides reassurance that mathematical success has more to do with curiosity and drive than innate aptitude, offering readers more than 300 hand-drawn sketches alongside accessible descriptions of topics.
List of contents
- 1: Mix up your routine, as cicadas with prime number cycles
- 2: Grow in accessible directions, like Voronoi diagrams
- 3: Rely on your reasoning abilities, because folded paper may reach the moon
- 4: Define success for yourself, given Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
- 5: Reach for the stars, just like Katherine Johnson
- 6: Find the right match, as with binary numbers and computers
- 7: Act natural, because of Benford's Law
- 8: Resist comparison, because of chaos theory
- 9: Look all around, as Archimedes did in life
- 10: Walk through the problem, as on the Konigsborg bridges
- 11: Untangle problems, with knot theory
- 12: Consider all options, as the shortest path between two points is not always straight
- 13: Look for beauty, because of Fibonacci numbers
- 14: Divide and conquer, just like Riemann sums in calculus
- 15: Embrace change, considering non-Euclidean geometry
- 16: Pursue an easier approach, considering the Pigeonhole Principle
- 17: Make an educated guess, like Kepler with his Sphere-packing Conjecture
- 18: Proceed at your own pace, because of terminal velocity
- 19: Pay attention to details, as Earth is an oblate spheroid
- 20: Join the community, with Hilbert's 23 problems
- 21: Search for like-minded math friends, because of the Twin Prime Conjecture
- 22: Abandon perfectionism, because of the Hairy Ball Theorem
- 23: Enjoy the pursuit, as Andrew Wiles did with Fermat's Last Theorem
- 24: Design your own pattern, because of the Penrose Patterns
- 25: Keep it simple whenever possible, since
- 26: Change your perspective, with Viviani's Theorem
- 27: Explore, on a Mobius strip
- 28: Be contradictory, because of the infinitude of primes
- 29: Cooperate when possible, because of game theory
- 30: Consider the less-travelled path, because of the Jordan Curve Theorem
- 31: Investigate, because of the golden rectangle
- 32: Be okay with small steps, as the harmonic series grows without bound
- 33: Work efficiently, like bacteriophages with icosahedral symmetry
- 34: Find the right balance, as in coding theory
- 35: Draw a picture, as in proofs without words
- 36: Incorporate nuance, because of fuzzy logic
- 37: Be grateful when solutions exist, because of Brouwer's Fixed Point Theorem
- 38: Update your understanding, with Bayesian statistics
- 39: Keep an open mind, because imaginary numbers exist
- 40: Appreciate the process, by taking a random walk
- 41: Fail more often, just like Albert Einstein did with
- 42: Get disoriented, on a Klein bottle
- 43: Go outside your realm of experience, on a hypercube
- 44: Follow your curiosity, along a space-filling curve
- 45: Exercise your imagination, with fractional dimensions
- 46: Proceed with care, because some infinities are larger than others
About the author
Susan D'Agostino is a mathematician and writer whose essays have been published in
Quanta Magazine, Scientific American, Financial Times, Nature, Undark, Times Higher Education, Chronicle of Higher Education, Math Horizons, Mathematics Teacher, and others. She earned her PhD in Mathematics from Dartmouth College, Master of Arts in Teaching Mathematics from Smith College, and BA in Anthropology from Bard College. She is a Council for the Advancement of Science Writing Taylor/Blakeslee Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Her website is www.susandagostino.com and her Twitter handle is @susan_dagostino.
Summary
How to Free Your Inner Mathematician delivers engaging mathematical content and provides reassurance that mathematical success has more to do with curiosity and drive than innate aptitude, offering readers more than 300 hand-drawn sketches alongside accessible descriptions of topics.
Additional text
I could describe the essays in this collection as inspiring and motivational, but that wouldn't quite communicate the validation I felt reading them... [the book] draws upon the theorems, applications, and history of mathematics to inspire lessons and advice for us along our mathematical (and other) pursuits. Delightful illustrations and an (honestly) enjoyable exercise accompany each essay. This book will appeal to aspiring mathematicians at any career stage, but its most important audience may be the latent mathematicians who have been discouraged from the discipline but are open to a fresh invitation.
