John Jennings/ Eugene Y. Arima (CON)/ Hallie E. Bond (CON)/ Steven C. Brown (CON)/ David Finch (CON)/ Don Gardner (CON)/ Gwyneth Hoyle (CON)/ C. Fred Johnston (CON)/ Kenneth R. Lister (CON/)
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Famous mathematical constants include the ratio of circular circumference to diameter, pi=3.14 …, and the natural logarithmic base, e=2.178 … Students and professionals usually can name at most a few others, but there are many more buried in the literature and awaiting discovery. How do such constants arise, and why are they important? Here Steven Finch provides 136 essays, each devoted to a mathematical constant or a class of constants, from the well known to the highly exotic. Topics covered include the statistics of continued fractions, chaos in nonlinear systems, prime numbers, sum-free sets, isoperimetric problems, approximation theory, self-avoiding walks and the Ising model (from statistical physics), binary and digital search trees (from theoretical computer science), the Prouhet-Thue-Morse sequence, complex analysis, geometric probability and the traveling salesman problem. This book will be helpful both to readers seeking information about a specific constant, and to
Famous mathematical constants include the ratio of circular circumference to diameter, π = 3.14 …, and the natural logarithm base, e = 2.718 …. Students and professionals can often name a few others, but there are many more buried in the literature and awaiting discovery. How do such constants arise, and why are they important? Here the author renews the search he began in his book Mathematical Constants, adding another 133 essays that broaden the landscape. Topics include the minimality of soap film surfaces, prime numbers, elliptic curves and modular forms, Poisson–Voronoi tessellations, random triangles, Brownian motion, uncertainty inequalities, Prandtl–Blasius flow (from fluid dynamics), Lyapunov exponents, knots and tangles, continued fractions, Galton–Watson trees, electrical capacitance (from potential theory), Zermelo's navigation problem, and the optimal control of a pendulum. Unsolved problems appear virtually everywhere as well. This volume continues an outstanding scholarl
The canoe was essential to the early exploration of North America. Today, it is a vital link to the natural environment and vast wilderness, still widely used for recreation, transportation and sport.
