The Art of Conjecturing, Together with Letter to a Friend on Sets in Court Tennis PDF Download

Author: Jacob Bernoulli
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801882357
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
"Part I reprints and reworks Huygens's On Reckoning in Games of Chance. Part II offers a thorough treatment of the mathematics of combinations and permutations, including the numbers since known as "Bernoulli numbers." In Part III, Bernoulli solves more complicated problems of games of chance using that mathematics. In the final part, Bernoulli's crowning achievement in mathematical probability becomes manifest he applies the mathematics of games of chance to the problems of epistemic probability in civil, moral, and economic matters, proving what we now know as the weak law of large numbers."

Author: Clyde Lee Miller
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813234166
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
“Learned ignorance,” the recognition that God is beyond us and our knowing capacities is the theological concept for which Nicholas of Cusa is most famous. Despite God’s apparent absence Nicholas offers original ways to think about God that would unite his presence with his absence. He called these proposals “conjectures” (coniecturae). Conjecture and conjecturing are central to the methodology of Nicholas’s philosophical theology and to his thinking about human knowledge. By using concrete examples from the everyday life of his times as symbolic imagery Nicholas makes what we say about God imaginatively available and theoretically plausible. He called such conjectural symbols “aenigmata” (= “symbolic or ‘enigmatic’ conjectures”) because they partially clarify and likewise point to an exact truth that is beyond us. Novel and imaginative, Nicholas’s conjectural examples break with the traditional medieval Aristotelian examples and provide further evidence of his role as a figure bridging medieval and Renaissance thought. Following his earlier book, Reading Cusanus (The Catholic University of America Press, 2003), Clyde Lee Miller here examines and comments on the meaning of “conjecture” in Nicholas of Cusa. The Art of Conjecture: Nicholas of Cusa on Knowledge explores what Nicholas meant by conjecture and its import as demonstrated in his treatises and sermons. Beginning with Nicholas’ On Conjectures, Miller analyzes a series of conjectural symbols and proposals across Nicholas’s less frequently discussed texts and recently published sermons. This early Renaissance thinker offers an original and ground-breaking way of framing speculation in philosophical theology and more generally in philosophy itself.

Author: Apostolos Doxiadis
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 057129569X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Uncle Petros is a family joke. An ageing recluse, he lives alone in a suburb of Athens, playing chess and tending to his garden. If you didn't know better, you'd surely think he was one of life's failures. But his young nephew suspects otherwise. For Uncle Petros, he discovers, was once a celebrated mathematician, brilliant and foolhardy enough to stake everything on solving a problem that had defied all attempts at proof for nearly three centuries - Goldbach's Conjecture. His quest brings him into contact with some of the century's greatest mathematicians, including the Indian prodigy Ramanujan and the young Alan Turing. But his struggle is lonely and single-minded, and by the end it has apparently destroyed his life. Until that is a final encounter with his nephew opens up to Petros, once more, the deep mysterious beauty of mathematics. Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture is an inspiring novel of intellectual adventure, proud genius, the exhilaration of pure mathematics - and the rivalry and antagonism which torment those who pursue impossible goals.

Author: Karl Raimund Popper
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415285940
Category : Knowledge, Theory of
Languages : en
Pages : 614

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Book Description
Conjectures and Refutations is one of Karl Popper's most wide-ranging and popular works, notable not only for its acute insight into the way scientific knowledge grows, but also for applying those insights to politics and to history. It provides one of the clearest and most accessible statements of the fundamental idea that guided his work: not only our knowledge, but our aims and our standards, grow through an unending process of trial and error.

Author: Bertrand Russell
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497675693
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 85

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Book Description
Three essays on mathematics, logic, and philosophy from the Noble Prize–winning author of A History of Western Philosophy. The essays in this little volume, published here for the first time in book form, were written by Bertrand Russell during the Second World War when he was less concerned with the stormy issues of nuclear warfare and the containment of Communist aggression and more with “the art of reckoning” in the fields of mathematics, logic and philosophy. The simplicity of Russell’s exposition is astonishing, as is his ability to get to the core of the great philosophical issues and to skillfully probe the depth of philosophical analysis.

Author: Donal O'Shea
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802718949
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Henri Poincaré was one of the greatest mathematicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He revolutionized the field of topology, which studies properties of geometric configurations that are unchanged by stretching or twisting. The Poincaré conjecture lies at the heart of modern geometry and topology, and even pertains to the possible shape of the universe. The conjecture states that there is only one shape possible for a finite universe in which every loop can be contracted to a single point. Poincaré's conjecture is one of the seven "millennium problems" that bring a one-million-dollar award for a solution. Grigory Perelman, a Russian mathematician, has offered a proof that is likely to win the Fields Medal, the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel prize, in August 2006. He also will almost certainly share a Clay Institute millennium award. In telling the vibrant story of The Poincaré Conjecture, Donal O'Shea makes accessible to general readers for the first time the meaning of the conjecture, and brings alive the field of mathematics and the achievements of generations of mathematicians whose work have led to Perelman's proof of this famous conjecture.

Author: Gabriel Navarro
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108428444
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Presents contemporary character theory of finite groups from the basics to the state of the art, with new, refined proofs.

Author: Karen Olsson
Publisher:
ISBN: 1526607549
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
'Beguiling ... Olsson is evocative on curiosity as an appetite of the mind, on the pleasure of glutting oneself on knowledge' New York Times Simone Weil- philosopher, political activist, mystic o and sister to Andr , one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. These two extraordinary siblings formed an obsession for Karen Olsson, who studied mathematics at Harvard, only to turn to writing as a vocation. When Olsson got hold of the 1940 letters between the siblings, she found they shared a curiosity about the inception of creative thought o that flash of insight o that Olsson experienced as both a maths student, and later, novelist. Following this thread of connections, The Weil Conjectures explores the lives of Simone and Andr , the lore and allure of mathematics, and its significance in Olsson's own life.

Author: James Franklin
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421418819
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 767

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Book Description
How did we make reliable predictions before Pascal and Fermat's discovery of the mathematics of probability in 1654? What methods in law, science, commerce, philosophy, and logic helped us to get at the truth in cases where certainty was not attainable? In The Science of Conjecture, James Franklin examines how judges, witch inquisitors, and juries evaluated evidence; how scientists weighed reasons for and against scientific theories; and how merchants counted shipwrecks to determine insurance rates. The Science of Conjecture provides a history of rational methods of dealing with uncertainty and explores the coming to consciousness of the human understanding of risk.

Author: Bertrand de Jouvenel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351305670
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Commissions of experts regularly meet to reply to questions such as: What will be the population of the country, or even of our planet, in ten, fifteen or twenty-five years? In what proportion will production have increased, what modifications will its composition and utilizations have undergone? The attraction of efforts to forecast the future continues. That is a fact. How does it proceed? That is a problem, one on which de Jouvenel focuses on in this book. The Art of Conjecture clearly explains what the "study of the future" can mean. De Jouvenel emphasizes the logical and political problems of forecasting and discusses methods in economics, sociology, and political science by which the future can be studied. More importantly, he discusses the fallacies to which the "study of the future" is peculiarly likely to give rise. The author argues that it is natural and necessary for the population to have visions of the future. Without this, he states, we would only be able to set one opinion of the future against another. If the origins and meanings of these predictions remained obscure, only the event could decide among the opinions. If any man can be said to have created the serious "study of the future" in our time, it is Bertrand de Jouvenel. Futuribles, a periodical he created, continues to represent a major turning point in contemporary social science. Jouvenel aimed to show how "the art of conjecture" could inform prudential judgment and allow citizens and statesmen to detect troubles before they arise.