Anita Burdman Feferman, Solomon Feferman

Alfred Tarski, one of the greatest logicians of all time, is widely thought of as 'the man who defined truth'. A charismatic teacher and zealous promoter of his view of logic as the foundation of all rational thought, he was also a bon-vivant and a womanizer. A fortuitous trip to the United States at the outbreak of war saved his life and turned his career around, even while it separated him from his family for years. By the war's end he was a professor of mathematics in Berkeley, building an empire in logic and methodology. From the cafes of Warsaw and Vienna to the mountains and deserts of California, this first full length biography places Tarski in the social, intellectual and historical context of his times and presents a frank, vivid picture of a personally and professionally passionate man, interlaced with an account of his major scientific achievements.

Thomas A. Garrity, Illustrated by Lori Pedersen

Beginning graduate students in mathematics and other quantitative subjects are expected to have a daunting breadth of mathematical knowledge. This book will help readers to fill in the gaps in their preparation by presenting the basic points and a few key results of the most important undergraduate topics in mathematics: linear algebra, vector calculus, geometry, real analysis, algorithms, probability, set theory, and more. By emphasizing the intuitions behind the subject, the book makes it easy for students to quickly get a feel for the topics that they have missed and to prepare for more advanced courses.

Greg N. Frederickson

Can you cut an octagon into 5 pieces and rearrange them into a square? How about turning a star into a pentagon? These are just two of the infinite challenges of geometric dissections, the mathematical art of cutting figures into pieces that can be rearranged to form other figures, using as few pieces as possible. This book shows you many ingenious ways to solve these problems and the beautiful constructions you can create. The author explains solution methods carefully, assuming only a basic knowledge of high school geometry, then poses puzzles for you to solve. He also introduces the people who have worked on these problems, travelling from the palace school of tenth-century Baghdad to the mathematical puzzle columns in turn-of-the-century newspapers. This beautifully illustrated book will provide hours of enjoyment for any mathematical puzzle enthusiast.

Les Pook

Flexagons are paper models that can be flexed in different ways to display different faces. They are easy to make, and work in surprising ways. This book contains numerous diagrams that the reader can photocopy and use to construct a variety of fascinating flexagons. Alongside this, the author also explains the mathematics behind these amazing creations. The technical details would require a mathematical background but the models can be made and used by anyone. Flexagons bring maths to life and will appeal to anyone interested in puzzles or recreational maths.

Greg N. Frederickson

Using this book, you can explore ways to create hinged collections of pieces that swing together to form a figure. Swing them another way and, like magic, they form another figure! Here you will learn ingenious new techniques for finding a wealth of hinged dissections: polygons, stars, crosses, curved and even three-dimensional figures. For an added challenge, try your hand at the puzzles scattered through the book or make up your own hinged dissections. The book's profuse illustrations and lively text will be accessible to anyone who remembers high school geometry.

Edited by Béla Bollobás

Littlewood's Miscellany, which includes most of the earlier work as well as much of the material Professor Littlewood collected after the publication of A Mathematician's Miscellany, allows us to see academic life in Cambridge, especially in Trinity College, through the eyes of one of its greatest figures. The joy that Professor Littlewood found in life and mathematics is reflected in the many amusing anecdotes about his contemporaries, written in his pungent, aphoristic style. The general reader should, in most instances, have no trouble following the mathematical passages.

Stephen Senn

Stephen Senn explains here how statistics determines many decisions about medical care, from allocating resources for health, to determining which drugs to license, to cause-and-effect in relation to disease. He tackles big themes: clinical trials and the development of medicines, life tables, vaccines and their risks or lack of them, smoking and lung cancer and even the power of prayer. He shows why reasoning with probability is essential to making rational decisions in medicine, and how it guides us when faced with choices that affect our health and even life.

Steven R. Finch

Here Steven Finch provides 136 essays, each devoted to a mathematical constant or a class of constants, from the well known to the highly exotic. This book will be helpful both to readers seeking information about a specific constant, and to readers who desire a panoramic view of all constants coming from a particular field, for example combinatorial enumeration or geometric optimization. Unsolved problems appear virtually everywhere as well. This is an outstanding scholarly attempt to bring together all significant mathematical constants in one place.

Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell

The great three-volume Principia Mathematica is deservedly the most famous work ever written on the foundations of mathematics. Its aim is to deduce all the fundamental propositions of logic and mathematics from a small number of logical premises and primitive ideas, and so to prove that mathematics is a development of logic. This abridged text of Volume I contains the material that is most relevant to an introductory study of logic and the philosophy of mathematics (more advanced students will wish to refer to the complete edition).

Ioan James

Ioan James introduces and profiles sixty mathematicians, all born between 1700 and 1910, an era which saw mathematics freed from its classical origins to develop into its modern form. The book is organised chronologically into ten chapters, each of which contains potted life stories of six mathematicians, all of whom made an important contribution to mathematics, through their ideas, their teaching, their influence, and so on. They are sufficiently representative that their stories, when read in sequence, convey in human terms something of the way in which mathematics developed.

J. Michael Steele

This lively, problem-oriented text, accessible to anyone who knows calculus, helps readers master the fundamental mathematical inequalities. With the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality as the initial guide, the reader is led through a sequence of fascinating problems whose solutions are presented as they might have been discovered - either by a famous mathematician or by the reader. Alongside these beautiful and surprising results, readers will find systematic coverage of the geometry of squares, convexity, the ladder of power means, majorization, Schur convexity, exponential sums, and the inequalities of Hölder, Hilbert, and Hardy.