Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty

SOLD (Maths, for many people, is an intimidating business. Number blindness is common, and we find it difficult to grasp numbers when they are very big or very small. The difference between a million and a billion, for example, doesn't seem too important - it's easy to think of both as 'a lot'. Yet the difference is huge, and the fact that multiplication is such a powerful engine for growth means that things like population can get out of control before we realise it.The truth is that maths is the most robust and breathtaking creation of the human mind, and yet our minds are ill-equipped to deal with its implications. But maths has more to teach us about ourselves than any other discipline - it can take us from the tiniest particles that make up our world to the farthest reaches of the universe. In The Universe and the Teacup, award-winning science writer K. C. Cole demystifies mathematics and explores its applications. Using real-life examples, such as risk, scale, cause-and-effect and probability, Cole breaks down the mind barrier and shows how maths can simplify problems so we can understand and solve them. Maths can tell us how to build a bridge or put a vehicle on Mars, where to save our money or how best to elect a government. Our search for the truths of the universe could not succeed without it. Even Einstein needed a little-known woman mathematician named Emmy Noether to establish the importance of mathematical symmetry to his theory of relativity.The story of Noether and Einstein ends Cole's amazing and thought-provoking journey. On the way she explores chaos and immutability, truth and beauty in a book of great elegance and enlightenment)