Search query: how math explains the world

Product: Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World
Description: Number one international best seller

An Adam Savage Book Club Pick

The book-length answer to anyone who ever put their hand up in math class and asked, "When am I ever going to use this in the real world?"

"Fun, informative, and relentlessly entertaining, Humble Pi is a charming and very readable guide to some of humanity's all-time greatest miscalculations - that also gives you permission to feel a little better about some of your own mistakes." (Ryan North, author of How to Invent Everything)

Our whole world is built on math, from the code running a website to the equations enabling the design of skyscrapers and bridges. Most of the time, this math works quietly behind the scenes...until it doesn’t. All sorts of seemingly innocuous mathematical mistakes can have significant consequences.

Math is easy to ignore until a misplaced decimal point upends the stock market, a unit conversion error causes a plane to crash, or someone divides by zero and stalls a battleship in the middle of the ocean.

Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near misses, and mathematical mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman Empire, and an Olympic team, Matt Parker uncovers the bizarre ways math trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world. Getting it wrong has never been more fun.
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Product: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe: How to Know What's Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake
Brand: Audible
Description: An all-encompassing guide to skeptical thinking from podcast host and academic neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine Steven Novella and his SGU co-hosts, which Richard Wiseman calls "the perfect primer for anyone who wants to separate fact from fiction."

It is intimidating to realize that we live in a world overflowing with misinformation, bias, myths, deception, and flawed knowledge. There really are no ultimate authority figures - no one has the secret, and there is no place to look up the definitive answers to our questions (not even Google).

Luckily, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is your map through this maze of modern life. Here Dr. Steven Novella - along with Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, and Evan Bernstein - will explain the tenets of skeptical thinking and debunk some of the biggest scientific myths, fallacies, and conspiracy theories - from anti-vaccines to homeopathy, UFO sightings to N-rays. You'll learn the difference between science and pseudoscience, essential critical thinking skills, ways to discuss conspiracy theories with that crazy co-worker of yours, and how to combat sloppy reasoning, bad arguments, and superstitious thinking.

So are you ready to join them on an epic scientific quest, one that has taken us from huddling in dark caves to setting foot on the moon? (Yes, we really did that.) Don't Panic! With The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, we can do this together.

"Thorough, informative, and enlightening, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe inoculates you against the frailties and shortcomings of human cognition. If this book does not become required reading for us all, we may well see modern civilization unravel before our eyes." (Neil deGrasse Tyson)

"In this age of real and fake information, your ability to reason, to think in scientifically skeptical fashion, is the most important skill you can have. Read The Skeptics' Guide Universe; get better at reasoning. And if this claim about the importance of reason is wrong, The Skeptics' Guide will help you figure that out, too." (Bill Nye)

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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Product: Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe
Description: From preeminent math personality and author of The Joy of x, a brilliant and endlessly appealing explanation of calculus—how it works and why it makes our lives immeasurably better.

Without calculus, we wouldn’t have cell phones, TV, GPS, or ultrasound. We wouldn’t have unraveled DNA or discovered Neptune or figured out how to put 5,000 songs in your pocket.

Though many of us were scared away from this essential, engrossing subject in high school and college, Steven Strogatz’s brilliantly creative, down-to-earth history shows that calculus is not about complexity; it’s about simplicity. It harnesses an unreal number—infinity—to tackle real-world problems, breaking them down into easier ones and then reassembling the answers into solutions that feel miraculous.

Infinite Powers recounts how calculus tantalized and thrilled its inventors, starting with its first glimmers in ancient Greece and bringing us right up to the discovery of gravitational waves (a phenomenon predicted by calculus). Strogatz reveals how this form of math rose to the challenges of each age: how to determine the area of a circle with only sand and a stick; how to explain why Mars goes “backwards” sometimes; how to make electricity with magnets; how to ensure your rocket doesn’t miss the moon; how to turn the tide in the fight against AIDS.

As Strogatz proves, calculus is truly the language of the universe. By unveiling the principles of that language, Infinite Powers makes us marvel at the world anew.
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Product: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Brand: Audible
Description: From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity's creation and evolution - a number one international best seller - that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be "human".

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one - Homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?

Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago, with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.

Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because, over the last few decades, humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become?

This provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.
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Product: Dancing with Qubits: How quantum computing works and how it can change the world
Brand: Packt Publishing
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Product: Official GRE Super Power Pack, Second Edition
Brand: McGraw-Hill Education
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Product: Workman Publishing Everything You Need to Ace English Language Arts in One Big Fat Notebook (Big Fat Notebooks)
Brand: Workman Publishing Company
Critical ideas highlighted in neon colors
Definitions explained
Doodles that illuminate tricky concepts in marker
Mnemonics for memorable shortcuts
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Product: The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World
Description: A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

National Bestseller

Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

A New York Times Notable Book

One of TIME’s 100 Must Read Books of the Year

One of The Washington Post’s 50 Notable Nonfiction Books of the Year

One of Smithsonian Magazine’s 10 Best Science Books of the Year

One of Publishers Weekly’s Best Nonfiction Books of the Year

A New York Times Editor’s Choice

Part H Is for Hawk, part The Soul of an Octopus, The Book of Eels is both a meditation on the world’s most elusive fish—the eel—and a reflection on the human condition
Remarkably little is known about the European eel, Anguilla anguilla. So little, in fact, that scientists and philosophers have, for centuries, been obsessed with what has become known as the “eel question”: Where do eels come from? What are they? Are they fish or some other kind of creature altogether? Even today, in an age of advanced science, no one has ever seen eels mating or giving birth, and we still don’t understand what drives them, after living for decades in freshwater, to swim great distances back to the ocean at the end of their lives. They remain a mystery.

Drawing on a breadth of research about eels in literature, history, and modern marine biology, as well as his own experience fishing for eels with his father, Patrik Svensson crafts a mesmerizing portrait of an unusual, utterly misunderstood, and completely captivating animal. In The Book of Eels, we meet renowned historical thinkers, from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud to Rachel Carson, for whom the eel was a singular obsession. And we meet the scientists who spearheaded the search for the eel’s point of origin, including Danish marine biologist Johannes Schmidt, who led research efforts in the early twentieth century, catching thousands upon thousands of eels, in the hopes of proving their birthing grounds in the Sargasso Sea.

Blending memoir and nature writing at its best, Svensson’s journey to understand the eel becomes an exploration of the human condition that delves into overarching issues about our roots and destiny, both as humans and as animals, and, ultimately, how to handle the biggest question of all: death. The result is a gripping and slippery narrative that will surprise and enchant.
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Product: What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Brand: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Houghton Mifflin
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Product: How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems
Brand: Riverhead Books
Color: Black
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Product: End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals
Brand: W. W. Norton & Company
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Product: Read the World: Rethinking Literacy for Empathy and Action in a Digital Age
Brand: Heinemann
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Product: You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place
Brand: Voracious
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Product: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of Their Lost World
Brand: William Morrow & Company
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Product: How Math Explains the World: A Guide to the Power of Numbers, from Car Repair to Modern Physics
Brand: Smithsonian Books (DC)
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Product: Everything You Need to Ace American History in One Big Fat Notebook: The Complete Middle School Study Guide (Big Fat Notebooks)
Brand: Workman Publishing Company
Part of a 5-book series for each main subject taught in middle school: Math, Science, American History, English Language Arts, and World History
Young readers will find every subjects key concepts, easily digested and summarized, with critical ideas highlighted in neon colors and definitions explained
Includes doodles that illuminate tricky concepts in marker, mnemonics for memorable shortcuts, and quizzes to recap it all
BIG FAT NOTEBOOKS meet Common Core State Standards, Next Generation Science Standards, and state history standards
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