Dana Mackenzie - Böcker

The hugely influential book on how the understanding of causality revolutionized science and the world, by the pioneer of artificial intelligence'Wonderful ... illuminating and fun to read' Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize-winner and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow'Correlation does not imply causation.' For decades, this mantra was invoked by scientists in order to avoid taking positions as to whether one thing caused another, such as smoking and cancer, or carbon dioxide and global warming. But today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, sparked by world-renowned computer scientist Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and placed cause and effect on a firm scientific basis. Now, Pearl and science journalist Dana Mackenzie explain causal thinking to general readers for the first time, showing how it allows us to explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It is the essence of human and artificial intelligence. And just as Pearl's discoveries have enabled machines to think better, The Book of Why explains how we too can think better.'Pearl's accomplishments over the last 30 years have provided the theoretical basis for progress in artificial intelligence and have redefined the term "thinking machine"' Vint Cerf

A captivating account of how a one-time mathematician cracked a two-thousand-year-old problem and rediscovered the joys of mathematics in the processMaster Sun’s problem—first posed by Sun Bin, a Chinese military strategist and supposed descendent of Sun Tzu, the legendary author of The Art of War—is an ancient strategy question whose elegant simplicity conceals a fiendishly difficult mathematical puzzle. The problem was largely ignored for two thousand years until a college friend of Dana Mackenzie revived it—and in doing so, rekindled Mackenzie’s passion for mathematics.Master Sun’s Problem is Mackenzie’s entertaining account of how, to his own amazement, he solved this tantalizing problem. Mackenzie, a former math professor turned science writer, describes every unexpected twist and turn, and provides advice, explanations, and plenty of examples for math lovers of all ages who want to try their own hand at discovering something new. Along the way, he traces the history of the problem and busts some myths about math and mathematicians, and reveals how the solution received a vital assist from ordinary people—the readers of The New York Times.An eloquent meditation on the nature and practice of mathematics, Master Sun’s Problem is a story of the uncommon pleasures of mathematical exploration and a unique testament to the power of collaboration and tenacious curiosity.

The What’s Happening in the Mathematical Sciences series presents a selection of recent discoveries and exciting fields of research in mathematics, explained in depth but in a slow-paced, reader-friendly way.In the first few months of 2023, artificial “brains” like ChatGPT and GPT-4 were constantly in the news, and they have already turned into big business. One chapter in this book, “Deep Learning: Part Math, Part Alchemy”, explains how math disentangles hype from reality and explains some of the remarkable advances of machine learning. Meanwhile, “Organizing the Chaos Inside the Brain” explores animal brains, and describes how biologists can apply chaos theory to simulate the wanderings of a fly from firing data on neurons within its brain.This issue of What's Happening also includes many treats for readers who like pure math—especially those who are interested in geometry. In recent months and years, there have been unexpected discoveries in tiling (“One Stone to Rule Them All”), sphere-packing in more than three dimensions (“A Fascination of Spheres”) and the reconstruction of three-dimensional scenes from two-dimensional images (“Multi-View Geometry: E Pluribus Unum”). The chapter “How to Draw an Alternate Universe” will, as promised, open a door to a completely different, non-Euclidean universe—or several of them. Shakespeare’s words, “something rich and strange”, only begin to describe them.In “How Mathematicians Unearthed the Stubborn Secrets of Fano Varieties”, readers will learn about one of the building blocks of algebraic geometry, the branch of geometry that deals with surfaces defined by polynomial equations. The chapter “Missing One Digit” addresses a seemingly elementary problem in number theory: how many prime numbers do not have a “7” in them? The answer is easy to guess—but hard to prove. “Fluid Flow: Two Paths to a Singularity” discusses another guess that is hard to prove: can fluids in an enclosed region develop “singularities” akin to a breaking wave? Computer evidence is mounting that they can—including some evidence from machine learning algorithms. (Which brings us full circle back to the “Deep Learning” chapter.)Dana Mackenzie has written for the What's Happening series since Volume 6, published in 2006. In this volume he is joined by Leila Sloman, whose name will be familiar to many readers from her work for Quanta Magazine.