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Cool Stories About Numbers by Steven Strogatz

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I mentioned a little while ago that Steve Strogatz’s has started a series of posts on numbers. By now, Steve has published six sequels. Every one of his posts explains in a very understandable manner either seemingly simple or seemingly complex issues related to numbers. They are very joyful and entertaining reads.

around here Steve moves from grade school arithmetic to high school math

  • The Joy of X” — “…in the end they all boil down to just two activities — solving for x and working with formulas.” … and always check for the units!
  • Finding Your Roots” — the square root of -1; complex numbers have all the properties as real numbers […], but they are better than real numbers, because they always have roots; a flip of 180 degrees can happen by multiplying twice with i or by multiplying with -1, so $$i^{2}=-1$$; fractals

Update Saturday; March 13, 2010:

Seedmagazine just published an interview with Steven Strogatz. The occasion of the interview was a book recently published by Strogatz: The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned about Life While Corresponding about Math

Written by Claus

March 12th, 2010 at 10:16 pm

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