Mathematics in Popular Culture PDF Download

Author: Jessica K. Sklar
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786489944
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Mathematics has maintained a surprising presence in popular media for over a century. In recent years, the movies Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind, and Stand and Deliver, the stage plays Breaking the Code and Proof, the novella Flatland and the hugely successful television crime series NUMB3RS all weave mathematics prominently into their storylines. Less obvious but pivotal references to the subject appear in the blockbuster TV show Lost, the cult movie The Princess Bride, and even Tolstoy’s War and Peace. In this collection of new essays, contributors consider the role of math in everything from films, baseball, crossword puzzles, fantasy role-playing games, and television shows to science fiction tales, award-winning plays and classic works of literature. Revealing the broad range of intersections between mathematics and mainstream culture, this collection demonstrates that even “mass entertainment” can have a hidden depth.

Author: Philip Beeley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000207471
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Libraries and archives contain many thousands of early modern mathematical books, of which almost equally many bear readers’ marks, ranging from deliberate annotations and accidental blots to corrections and underlinings. Such evidence provides us with the material and intellectual tools for exploring the nature of mathematical reading and the ways in which mathematics was disseminated and assimilated across different social milieus in the early centuries of print culture. Other evidence is important, too, as the case studies collected in the volume document. Scholarly correspondence can help us understand the motives and difficulties in producing new printed texts, library catalogues can illuminate collection practices, while manuscripts can teach us more about textual traditions. By defining and illuminating the distinctive world of early modern mathematical reading, the volume seeks to close the gap between the history of mathematics as a history of texts and history of mathematics as part of the broader history of human culture.

Author: Ingrid Alexander-Skipnes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317192060
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
During the early modern period there was a natural correspondence between how artists might benefit from the knowledge of mathematics and how mathematicians might explore, through advances in the study of visual culture, new areas of enquiry that would uncover the mysteries of the visible world. This volume makes its contribution by offering new interdisciplinary approaches that not only investigate perspective but also examine how mathematics enriched aesthetic theory and the human mind. The contributors explore the portrayal of mathematical activity and mathematicians as well as their ideas and instruments, how artists displayed their mathematical skills and the choices visual artists made between geometry and arithmetic, as well as Euclid’s impact on drawing, artistic practice and theory. These chapters cover a broad geographical area that includes Italy, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, France and England. The artists, philosophers and mathematicians whose work is discussed include Leon Battista Alberti, Nicholas Cusanus, Marsilio Ficino, Francesco di Giorgio, Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Verrocchio, as well as Michelangelo, Galileo, Piero della Francesca, Girard Desargues, William Hogarth, Albrecht Dürer, Luca Pacioli and Raphael.

Author: Raymond L. Wilder
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 1483100618
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Mathematics as a Cultural System discusses the relationship between mathematics and culture. The book is comprised of eight chapters discussing topics that support the concept of mathematics as a cultural system. Chapter I deals with the nature of culture and cultural systems, while Chapter 2 provides examples of cultural patterns observable in the evolution of mechanics. Chapter III treats historical episodes as a laboratory for the illustration of patterns and forces that have been operative in cultural change. Chapter IV covers hereditary stress, and Chapter V discusses consolidation as a force and process. Chapter VI talks about the singularities in the evolution of mechanics, while Chapter 7 deals with the laws governing the evolution of mathematics. Chapter VIII tackles the role and future of mathematics. The book will be of great interest to readers who are curious about how mathematics relates to culture.

Author: Alan Bishop
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 940092657X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Mathematics is in the unenviable position of being simultaneously one of the most important school subjects for today's children to study and one of the least well understood. Its reputation is awe-inspiring. Everybody knows how important it is and everybody knows that they have to study it. But few people feel comfortable with it; so much so that it is socially quite acceptable in many countries to confess ignorance about it, to brag about one's incompe tence at doing it, and even to claim that one is mathophobic! So are teachers around the world being apparently legal sadists by inflicting mental pain on their charges? Or is it that their pupils are all masochists, enjoying the thrill of self-inflicted mental torture? More seriously, do we really know what the reasons are for the mathematical activity which goes on in schools? Do we really have confidence in our criteria for judging what's important and what isn't? Do we really know what we should be doing? These basic questions become even more important when considered in the context of two growing problem areas. The first is a concern felt in many countries about the direction which mathematics education should take in the face of the increasing presence of computers and calculator-related technol ogy in society.

Author: Elana Reiser
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786477067
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Mathematics teachers often struggle to motivate their students. One way to cultivate and maintain student interest is for teachers to incorporate popular media into their methodology. Organized on the subject strands of the Common Core, this book explores math concepts featured in contemporary films and television shows and offers numerous examples high school math teachers can use to design lessons using pop culture references. Outlines for lessons are provided along with background stories and historical references.

Author: Matthew Handelman
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823283852
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This book offers an archeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of World War II. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative, showing how for other German-Jewish thinkers, such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer, mathematics offered metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Influential theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique, Handelman shows, borrowed from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. Their vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing from the intellectual history of critical theory, whether in the work of second generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas or in contemporary critiques of technology. The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us intervene in our digital and increasingly mathematical present.

Author: Peter Michael Appelbaum
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791422694
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This ground-breaking book analyzes contemporary education discourse in the light of curriculum politics and popular culture, using sources ranging from academic scholarship to popular magazines, music video, film and television game shows. Mathematics is used as an "extreme case," since it is a discipline so easily accepted as separable from politics, ethics or the social construction of knowledge. Appelbaum's juxtaposition of popular culture, public debate and professional practice enables an examination of the production and mediation of "common sense" distinctions between school mathematics and the world outside of schools. Terrain ordinarily displaced or excluded by traditional education literature becomes the pendulum for a new conversation which merges research and practice while discarding pre-conceived categories of understanding. The book also serves as an entertaining introduction to emerging theories in cultural studies, progressively illustrating the uses of discourse analysis for comprehending ideology, the implications of power/knowledge links, professional practice as a technology of power, and curriculum as at once commodities and cultural resources. In this way, Appelbaum effectively reveals a direction for teachers, students and researchers to cooperatively form a community attentive to the politics of curriculum and popular culture.

Author: Peter M. Appelbaum
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791422700
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
This ground-breaking book analyzes contemporary education discourse in the light of curriculum politics and popular culture, using sources ranging from academic scholarship to popular magazines, music video, film and television game shows. Mathematics is used as an “extreme case,” since it is a discipline so easily accepted as separable from politics, ethics or the social construction of knowledge. Appelbaum’s juxtaposition of popular culture, public debate and professional practice enables an examination of the production and mediation of “common sense” distinctions between school mathematics and the world outside of schools. Terrain ordinarily displaced or excluded by traditional education literature becomes the pendulum for a new conversation which merges research and practice while discarding pre-conceived categories of understanding The book also serves as an entertaining introduction to emerging theories in cultural studies, progressively illustrating the uses of discourse analysis for comprehending ideology, the implications of power/knowledge links, professional practice as a technology of power, and curriculum as at once commodities and cultural resources. In this way, Appelbaum effectively reveals a direction for teachers, students and researchers to cooperatively form a community attentive to the politics of curriculum and popular culture

Author: Michael Harris
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691175837
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
An insightful reflection on the mathematical soul What do pure mathematicians do, and why do they do it? Looking beyond the conventional answers—for the sake of truth, beauty, and practical applications—this book offers an eclectic panorama of the lives and values and hopes and fears of mathematicians in the twenty-first century, assembling material from a startlingly diverse assortment of scholarly, journalistic, and pop culture sources. Drawing on his personal experiences and obsessions as well as the thoughts and opinions of mathematicians from Archimedes and Omar Khayyám to such contemporary giants as Alexander Grothendieck and Robert Langlands, Michael Harris reveals the charisma and romance of mathematics as well as its darker side. In this portrait of mathematics as a community united around a set of common intellectual, ethical, and existential challenges, he touches on a wide variety of questions, such as: Are mathematicians to blame for the 2008 financial crisis? How can we talk about the ideas we were born too soon to understand? And how should you react if you are asked to explain number theory at a dinner party? Disarmingly candid, relentlessly intelligent, and richly entertaining, Mathematics without Apologies takes readers on an unapologetic guided tour of the mathematical life, from the philosophy and sociology of mathematics to its reflections in film and popular music, with detours through the mathematical and mystical traditions of Russia, India, medieval Islam, the Bronx, and beyond.