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Queen of the Sciences: A History of Mathematics (Audiobook - TTC) (Repost)

Posted By: bookwyrm
Queen of the Sciences: A History of Mathematics (Audiobook - TTC) (Repost)

Queen of the Sciences: A History of Mathematics (Audiobook) By Professor David M. Bressoud
2008 | 12 hours and 14 mins | ISBN: 159803426X | MP3 83 kbps | 483 MB


An inquiring mind is all you need to embark on this supreme intellectual adventure in The Queen of the Sciences: A History of Mathematics, which contains 24 illuminating lectures taught by award-winning Professor of Mathematics David M. Bressoud. The history of mathematics concerns one of the most magnificent, surprising, and powerful of all human achievements. In the early 19th century, the noted German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss called mathematics the "queen of the sciences" because it was so successful at uncovering the nature of physical reality. Gauss's observation is even more accurate in today's age of quantum physics, string theory, chaos theory, information technology, and other mathematics-intensive disciplines that have transformed the way we understand and deal with the world. The Queen of the Sciences takes you from ancient Mesopotamia—where the Pythagorean theorem was already in use more than 1,000 years before the Greek thinker Pythagoras traditionally proved it—to the Human Genome Project, which uses sophisticated mathematical techniques to decipher the 3 billion letters of the human genetic code. Along the way, you meet a remarkable range of individuals whose love of numbers, patterns, and shapes created the grand edifice that is mathematics. These include astrologers, lawyers, a poet, a cult leader, a tax assessor, the author of the most popular textbook ever written, a high school teacher, a blind grandfather, an artist, and several prodigies who died too young. You find the problems and ideas that preoccupied them can be stated with the utmost simplicity: The second of these propositions, called Fermat's last theorem, is one of the most famous in mathematics. It was followed by this postscript in the book where Fermat jotted it down: "I have a truly marvelous demonstration, which this margin is too narrow to contain." Since Fermat never wrote out his proof, his statement served as a tantalizing challenge to succeeding generations of mathematicians. The difficult road to a proof of Fermat's last theorem is a theme that surfaces throughout the last half of this course. Among other intriguing facts, you learn that Circle Limit III, a mathematically inspired woodcut by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher, relates directly to the technique that eventually showed the way to a solution by mathematician Andrew Wiles in 1994. Professor Bressoud begins the course by defining mathematics as the study of the abstraction of patterns. Mathematics arises from patterns observed in the world, usually patterns expressed in terms of number and spatial relationships. Furthermore, it is a human endeavor found in every culture extending back as far as records go. The Queen of the Sciences focuses on the European tradition that grew out of early mathematics in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece. The first eight lectures examine these foundations and the contributions of India, China, and the Islamic world, which played important roles in the development of European mathematical achievements. The next eight lectures show how Western Europe, beginning in the late Middle Ages, gathered existing mathematical ideas and refined them into new and powerful tools. The heart of this section is five lectures on the 17th century, when the separate threads of geometry, algebra, and trigonometry began to meld into a cohesive whole, one whose fruits included the creation of calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Calculus is another recurring theme throughout this course, making its first appearance in the method of exhaustion developed by the ancient Greeks. In the early 17th century, John Napier initiated the idea of logarithms, which added to the examples from which the general rules of calculus emerged. You discover how, in his ceaseless toying with his new invention, Napier chanced on a base that is the equivalent to the modern base of the natural logarithm used in calculus: the famous number now known as e (2.71828 ... ). After studying the 18th-century contributions of Leonhard Euler—possibly the greatest mathematician who ever lived—you look at how art has influenced geometry and all of mathematics. You investigate mosaics from the Alhambra, prints by M. C. Escher and Albrecht Dürer, and other intriguing shapes and forms. In the final eight lectures, you explore selected mathematical developments of the past 200 years, including: Course page http://www.teach12.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=1434