Search results

First published in 1953, this volume collects in one place a number of works by the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). The works included in this anthology were selected by F. S. C. Northrop and Mason W. Gross, who omitted only the major early works which were readily available elsewhere. For each selection, an introduction has been supplied by Dr Gross, and a glossary illuminating Whitehead's unique terminology has been appended to the end of the volume. This book...

What sorts of things are numbers? How is it possible to know about them? And how, in knowing about them,do we thereby have knowledge of features of th material world? These questions are almost as old as philosophy itself. In Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects Crispin Wright defends modernised versions of the responses to them of the great German mathamatician and philosopher, Gottlob Frege, who held that numbers are a kind of logical object and that our knowledge about them, and its relev...

This volume tracks Ramsey's philosophical development over the course of his short life, arguing that there runs throughout Ramsey's work a methodological commitment to philosophising in what he called 'the realistic spirit', a commitment which is only given that name by him in 1929, the final year of his life. This commitment is characterised by the rejection of various (though not all) forms of realism, not as false, but as nonsensical. A large part of the book is concerned with characterising...

The idea of elegance in science is not necessarily a familiar one, but it is an important one. The use of the term is perhaps most clear-cut in mathematics - the elegant proof - and this is where Ian Glynn begins his exploration. Scientists often share a sense of admiration and excitement on hearing of an elegant solution to a problem, an elegant theory, or an elegant experiment. The idea of elegance may seem strange in a field of endeavour that prides itself in its objectivity, but only if sc...

Elliptic Tales describes the latest developments in number theory by looking at one of the most exciting unsolved problems in contemporary mathematics--the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture. In this book, Avner Ash and Robert Gross guide readers through the mathematics they need to understand this captivating problem. The key to the conjecture lies in elliptic curves, which may appear simple, but arise from some very deep--and often very mystifying--mathematical ideas. Using only basic algeb...

Relax: no one understands technical mathematics without lengthy training but we all have an intuitive grasp of the ideas behind the symbols. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), this book is designed to showcase the beauty of mathematics - including images inspired by mathematical problems - together with its unreasonable effectiveness and applicability, without frying your brain. The book is a collection of 50 original e...

The first English translation of Hans Reichenbach's lucid doctoral thesis sheds new light on how Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was understood in some quarters at the time. The source of several themes in his still influential The Direction of Time, the thesis shows Reichenbach's early focus on the interdependence of physics, probability, and epistemology.

Sir Horace Lamb (1849-1934) the British mathematician, wrote a number of influential works in classical physics. A pupil of Stokes and Clerk Maxwell, he taught for ten years as the first professor of mathematics at the University of Adelaide before returning to Britain to take up the post of professor of physics at the Victoria University of Manchester (where he had first studied mathematics at Owens College). As a teacher and writer his stated aim was clarity: 'somehow to make these dry bones l...

Augustin-Louis, Baron Cauchy (1789-1857) was the pre-eminent French mathematician of the nineteenth century. He began his career as a military engineer during the Napoleonic Wars, but even then was publishing significant mathematical papers, and was persuaded by Lagrange and Laplace to devote himself entirely to mathematics. His greatest contributions are considered to be the Cours d'analyse de l'Ecole Royale Polytechnique (1821), Resume des lecons sur le calcul infinitesimal (1823) and Lecons s...

This book offers a detailed history of parametric statistical inference. Covering the period between James Bernoulli and R.A. Fisher, it examines: binomial statistical inference; statistical inference by inverse probability; the central limit theorem and linear minimum variance estimation by Laplace and Gauss; error theory, skew distributions, correlation, sampling distributions; and the Fisherian Revolution. Lively biographical sketches of many of the main characters are featured throughout, in...