Persi Diaconis - Böcker

Magical Mathematics reveals the secrets of fun-to-perform card tricks--and the profound mathematical ideas behind them--that will astound even the most accomplished magician. Persi Diaconis and Ron Graham provide easy, step-by-step instructions for each trick, explaining how to set up the effect and offering tips on what to say and do while performing it. Each card trick introduces a new mathematical idea, and varying the tricks in turn takes readers to the very threshold of today's mathematical knowledge. Diaconis and Graham tell the stories--and reveal the best tricks--of the eccentric and brilliant inventors of mathematical magic. The book exposes old gambling secrets through the mathematics of shuffling cards, explains the classic street-gambling scam of three-card Monte, traces the history of mathematical magic back to the oldest mathematical trick--and much more.

This book develops a clear and systematic treatment of time series of data, regular and chaotic, that one finds in observations of nonlinear systems. The reader is led from measurements of one or more variables through the steps of building models of the source as a dynamical system, classifying the source by its dynamical characteristics, and finally predicting and controlling the dynamical system. The text examines methods for separating the signal of physical interest from contamination by unwanted noise, and for investigating the phase space of the chaotic signal and its properties. The emphasis throughout is on the use of the modern mathematical tools for investigating chaotic behavior to uncover properties of physical systems. The methods require knowledge of dynamical systems at the advanced undergraduate level and some knowledge of Fourier transforms and other signal processing methods.The toolkit developed in the book will provide the reader with efficient and effective methods for analyzing signals from nonlinear sources; these methods are applicable to problems of control, communication, and prediction in a wide variety of systems encountered in physics, chemistry, biology, and geophysics.

A fascinating account of the breakthrough ideas that transformed probability and statistics In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gamblers and mathematicians transformed the idea of chance from a mystery into the discipline of probability, setting the stage for a series of breakthroughs that enabled or transformed innumerable fields, from gambling, mathematics, statistics, economics, and finance to physics and computer science. This book tells the story of ten great ideas about chance and the thinkers who developed them, tracing the philosophical implications of these ideas as well as their mathematical impact. Persi Diaconis and Brian Skyrms begin with Girolamo Cardano, a sixteenth-century physician, mathematician, and professional gambler who helped develop the idea that chance actually can be measured. They describe how later thinkers showed how the judgment of chance also can be measured, how frequency is related to chance, and how chance, judgment, and frequency could be unified.Diaconis and Skyrms explain how Thomas Bayes laid the foundation of modern statistics, and they explore David Hume's problem of induction, Andrey Kolmogorov's general mathematical framework for probability, the application of computability to chance, and why chance is essential to modern physics. A final idea--that we are psychologically predisposed to error when judging chance--is taken up through the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Complete with a brief probability refresher, Ten Great Ideas about Chance is certain to be a hit with anyone who wants to understand the secrets of probability and how they were discovered.

A fascinating account of the breakthrough ideas that transformed probability and statisticsIn the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gamblers and mathematicians transformed the idea of chance from a mystery into the discipline of probability, setting the stage for a series of breakthroughs that enabled or transformed innumerable fields, from gambling, mathematics, statistics, economics, and finance to physics and computer science. This book tells the story of ten great ideas about chance and the thinkers who developed them. Complete with a brief probability refresher, Ten Great Ideas about Chance is certain to be a hit with anyone who wants to understand the secrets of probability and how they were discovered.

Discrete probability theory and the theory of algorithms have become close partners over the last ten years, though the roots of this partnership go back much longer. The papers in this volume address the latest developments in this active field. They are from the IMA Workshops "Probability and Algorithms" and "The Finite Markov Chain Renaissance." They represent the current thinking of many of the world's leading experts in the field.Researchers and graduate students in probability, computer science, combinatorics, and optimization theory will all be interested in this collection of articles. The techniques developed and surveyed in this volume are still undergoing rapid development, and many of the articles of the collection offer an expositionally pleasant entree into a research area of growing importance.

This book gives a lively development of the mathematics needed to answer the question, ""How many times should a deck of cards be shuffled to mix it up?"" The shuffles studied are the usual ones that real people use: riffle, overhand, and smooshing cards around on the table.The mathematics ranges from probability (Markov chains) to combinatorics (symmetric function theory) to algebra (Hopf algebras). There are applications to magic tricks and gambling along with a careful comparison of the mathematics to the results of real people shuffling real cards. The book explores links between shuffling and higher mathematics--Lie theory, algebraic topology, the geometry of hyperplane arrangements, stochastic calculus, number theory, and more. It offers a useful springboard for seeing how probability theory is applied and leads to many corners of advanced mathematics.The book can serve as a text for an upper division course in mathematics, statistics, or computer science departments and will be appreciated by graduate students and researchers in mathematics, statistics, and computer science, as well as magicians and people with a strong background in mathematics who are interested in games that use playing cards.