Professor Stewart R Craggs Livres

Many people think mathematics is useless. They're wrong. In the UK, the 2.8 million people employed in the mathematical science occupations contributed £208 billion to the economy in a single year - that's 10 per cent of the workforce contributing 16 per cent of the economy. What's the Use? asks why there is such a vast gulf between public perceptions of mathematics and reality. It shows how mathematics is vital, often in surprising ways, behind the scenes of daily life. How politicians pick their voters. How an absurd little puzzle solved 300 years ago leads to efficient methods for kidney transplants. How an Irish mathematician's obsession with a new number system improves special effects in movies and computer games. How SatNav relies on at least six mathematical techniques. And how a bizarre, infinitely wiggly curve helps to optimise deliveries to your door

Uncertainty is everywhere. It lurks in every consideration of the future - the weather, the economy, the sex of an unborn child - even quantities we think that we know such as populations or the transit of the planets contain the possibility of error. It's no wonder that, throughout that history, we have attempted to produce rigidly defined areas of uncertainty - we prefer the surprise party to the surprise asteroid.We began our quest to make certain an uncertain world by reading omens in livers, tea leaves, and the stars. However, over the centuries, driven by curiosity, competition, and a desire be better gamblers, pioneering mathematicians and scientists began to reduce wild uncertainties to tame distributions of probability and statistical inferences. But, even as unknown unknowns became known unknowns, our pessimism made us believe that some problems were unsolvable and our intuition misled us. Worse, as we realized how omnipresent and varied uncertainty is, we encountered chaos, quantum mechanics, and the limitations of our predictive power.Bestselling author Professor Ian Stewart explores the history and mathematics of uncertainty. Touching on gambling, probability, statistics, financial and weather forecasts, censuses, medical studies, chaos, quantum physics, and climate, he makes one thing clear: a reasonable probability is the only certainty.

With its laser-focus on the verbal and visual infrastructure of narrative, The Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors is the first sustained comparative study of how image patterns are tracked in prose and cinema. In film examples ranging from Citizen Kane through Apocalypse Now to Blade Runner 2049, then on to Christopher Nolan's 2020 Tenet, Garrett Stewart follows the shift from celluloid to digital cinema through various narrative manifestations of the image, from freeze-frames to computer-generated special effects. By bringing cinema alongside literature, Stewart discovers a common tendency in contemporary storytelling, in both prose and visual narrative, from the ongoing trend of “mind-game” films to the often puzzling narrative eccentricities of such different writers as Nicholson Baker and Richard Powers-including the latter's eerie mirroring of reader empathy in his 2021 Bewilderment.