New Books Network
Mathematics
Mathematics January 8, 2021

A New Year's Present from a Mathematician

Snezana Lawrence

Hosted by Cory Brunson
It would be simple enough to say that mathematics is being done, and that those who do it are mathematicians. Yet, the history and culture of the mathematical community immediately …

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Mathematics December 7, 2020

The Fate of Schrodinger's Cat

Using Math and Computers to Explore the Counterintuitive

James D. Stein

Hosted by Cory Brunson
Math has a complicated relationship with the counterintuitive: Rigorous logic, calculation, and simulation can both help us wrap our minds around phenomena that defy our intuition, and thrust upon us whole new worlds …
Mathematics December 1, 2020

Supermath

The Power of Numbers for Good and Evil

Anna Weltman

Hosted by Cory Brunson
Mathematics as a subject is distinctive in its symbolic abstraction and its potential for logical and computational rigor. But mathematicians tend to impute other qualities to our subject that set …
Mathematics November 11, 2020

The Joy of Geometry

Alfred S. Posamentier

Hosted by Jim Stein
Alfred S. Posamentier's The Joy of Geometry (Prometheus, 2020) is a book for someone who has taken geometry but wants to go further. This book, as one might expect, is …
Mathematics September 29, 2020

How to Free Your Inner Mathematician

Notes on Mathematics and Life

Susan D'Agostino

Hosted by Cory Brunson
Doing mathematics can be stimulating, deep, and sometimes fantastic. It can also be frustrating, impenetrable, and at times dispiriting. In her new collection of essays, writer and mathematician Susan D'Agostino …
Mathematics September 9, 2020

Mathematics Entertainment for the Millions

Alfred Posamentier

Hosted by Jim Stein
The book being discussed is Mathematics Entertainment for the Millions (World Scientific Publishing Co.), by Alfred Posamentier. In reading this book, it occurred to me that it might equally well …
Economics September 4, 2020

Dark Data

Why What You Don't Know Matters

David J. Hand

Hosted by Cory Brunson
There is no shortage of books on the growing impact of data collection and analysis on our societies, our cultures, and our everyday lives. David Hand's new book Dark Data …
European Studies August 24, 2020

Calculus Reordered

A History of the Big Ideas

David Bressoud

Hosted by Mark Molloy
Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas (Princeton UP, 2019) takes readers on a remarkable journey through hundreds of years to tell the story of how calculus evolved into …
Literature August 13, 2020

Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries

Satyan Devadoss and Matt Harvey

Hosted by Jim Stein
There are very few math books that merit the adjective ‘charming’ but Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries (MIT Press, 2020) is one of them. Satyan Devadoss and Matt Harvey have …
Philosophy July 10, 2020

Games in the Philosophy of Biology

Cailin O’Connor

Hosted by Carrie Figdor
The branch of mathematics called game theory – the Prisoners Dilemma is a particularly well-known example of a game – is used by philosophers, social scientists, and others to explore …
Mathematics July 8, 2020

An Invitation to Applied Category Theory

Seven Sketches in Compositionality

Brendan Fong and David I. Spivak

Hosted by Cory Brunson
Category theory is well-known for abstraction—concepts and tools from diverse fields being recognized as specific cases of more foundational structures—though the field has always been driven and shaped by the …
Sports June 25, 2020

The Hot Hand

The Mystery and Science of Streaks

Ben Cohen

Hosted by Paul Knepper
For decades, statisticians, social scientists, psychologists, and economists (among them Nobel Prize winners) have spent massive amounts of precious time thinking about whether streaks actually exist. After all, a substantial …
Religion June 2, 2020

Until the End of Time

Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

Brian Greene

Hosted by John Weston
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and …
Mathematics May 29, 2020

Discrete Mathematics with Ducks (Second Edition)

sarah-marie belcastro

Hosted by Cory Brunson
Introductory courses in discrete mathematics cover a variety of distinctive but interconnected topics, from the underpinnings of logic and set theory through overviews of combinatorics and graph theory, which lend …
Art April 22, 2020

Beautiful Symmetry

A Coloring Book about Math

Alex Berke

Hosted by Jim Stein
Alex Berke's Beautiful Symmetry (MIT Press, 2020) is both a fascinating book and a concept -- it's like no other book I’ve ever read. It's a coloring book about math …
Communications April 3, 2020

Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons

From the Mathematics of Heat to the Development of the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable

Paul J. Nahin

Hosted by Jim Stein
Hot Molecules, Cold Electrons: From the Mathematics of Heat to the Development of the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable (Princeton University Press, 2020), by Paul Nahin, is a book that is meant …
Language March 30, 2020

Sleight of Mind

75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy

Matt Cook

Hosted by Jim Stein
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require …
Biography March 10, 2020

Math Makers

The Lives and Works of 50 Famous Mathematicians

Alfred S. Posamentier

Hosted by Jim Stein
Today I talked to Alfred S. Posamentier, a co-author (with Christian Spreitzer) of Math Makers: The Lives and Works of 50 Famous Mathematicians (Prometheus, 2020). This charming book is more …
Mathematics February 26, 2020

Geometry

The Line and the Circle

Maureen T. Carroll and Elyn Rykken

Hosted by Cory Brunson
From an undergraduate perspective, coming from the rigid proofs and concrete constructions of middle- or high-school courses, the broad discipline of geometry can be at once intimately familiar and menacingly …
American Studies January 29, 2020

Scouting and Scoring

How We Know What We Know About Baseball

Christopher J. Phillips

Hosted by Michael McGovern
The so-called Sabermetrics revolution in baseball that began in the 1970s, popularized by the book—and later Hollywood film—Moneyball, was supposed to represent a triumph of observation over intuition. Cash-strapped clubs …