‘Brilliant and fascinating. No one is better at making the recondite accessible and exciting’ Bill BrysonBritain’s most famous mathematician takes us to the edge of knowledge to show us what we cannot know.Is the universe infinite?Do we know what happened before the Big Bang?Where is human consciousness located in the brain?And are there more undiscovered particles out there, beyond the Higgs boson?In the modern world, science is king: weekly headlines proclaim the latest scientific...
From the author of The Music of the Primes and Finding Moonshine comes a short, lively book on five mathematical problems that just refuse be solved – and on how many everyday problems can be solved by maths.Every time we download a song from i-tunes, take a flight across the Atlantic or talk on our mobile phones, we are relying on great mathematical inventions. Maths may fail to provide answers to various of its own problems, but it can provide answers to problems that don't seem to be its own...
This new ebook from the author of 'The Music of the Primes' combines a personal insight into the mind of a working mathematician with the story of one of the biggest adventures in mathematics: the search for symmetry.This is the story of how humankind has come to its understanding of the bizarre world of symmetry – a subject of fundamental significance to the way we interpret the world around us.Our eyes and minds are drawn to symmetrical objects, from the sphere to the swastika, the pyramid to...