{"id":979,"date":"2011-01-17T14:40:47","date_gmt":"2011-01-17T22:40:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=979"},"modified":"2011-01-17T14:47:54","modified_gmt":"2011-01-17T22:47:54","slug":"for-your-reading-pleasure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/?p=979","title":{"rendered":"For Your Reading Pleasure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today I am going to depart from my usual ideological purity and succumb to the lure of crass commercialism. Yes, I want to use this posting to promote my new book, <em>What&#8217;s Happening in the Mathematical Sciences<\/em> (Vol. 8).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/happening8-cover.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/happening8-cover.png\" width=\"350\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m afraid that you won&#8217;t learn anything about chess from this book. However, it&#8217;s your go-to book if you want to read about any of these things in plain English:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Netflix Prize, and how computers can predict what movies you will like better than a human can.<\/li>\n<li>The Weinstein Conjecture, or what the mathematics of monopoles can tell you about pendulums.<\/li>\n<li>What mathematics had to do with the financial crisis of 2007-8.<\/li>\n<li>How to make a billiard ball go out to infinity.<\/li>\n<li>The breast cancer screening debate of 2009, and how mathematical models are used to predict the benefits and harms of public health initiatives.<\/li>\n<li>Why certain physical systems (like the milk in your coffee) abruptly go from unmixed to mixed.<\/li>\n<li>Why &#8220;quantum chaos&#8221; is an oxymoron, and how mathematicians have nevertheless found an example of it.<\/li>\n<li>How to pack triangular pyramids, or tetrahedra, in the most efficient way. (Beverage container industry, take note!)<\/li>\n<li>The Kervaire Invariant One problem, or why there&#8217;s no place like 126-dimensional space.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And on top of this, you get to see lots and lots of pretty color pictures. Two of them are reproduced on the cover: the Hopf fibration and behind it (very blurred, so that it looks like some kind of green and brown blobs) the standard contact form in three-dimensional space.<\/p>\n<p>The book costs $23 at list price, or $18.40 if you are a member of the American Mathematical Society. Here are the links to the order pages at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Whats-Happening-Mathematical-Sciences-Mathermatical\/dp\/0821849999\/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1295301032&amp;sr=1-9\" target=\"_blank\">Amazon<\/a> and at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ams.org\/bookstore?fn=20&amp;arg1=whatsnew&amp;ikey=HAPPENING-8\" target=\"_blank\">AMS<\/a>. By the way, my editor tells me that the AMS actually loses money on the <em>What&#8217;s Happening<\/em> books, but they do so more or less intentionally because of the importance of giving mathematics a public presence. So if you buy the book, not only are you getting <em>more<\/em> than your money&#8217;s worth, you are also increasing the visibility of math in our society! Woo hoo!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I am going to depart from my usual ideological purity and succumb to the lure of crass commercialism. Yes, I want to use this posting to promote my new book, What&#8217;s Happening in the Mathematical Sciences (Vol. 8). I&#8217;m afraid that you won&#8217;t learn anything about chess from this book. However, it&#8217;s your go-to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1363,14,235],"tags":[1628,1626,1629,1624,472,1627,1622,1631,1630,1625,1623,1621],"class_list":["post-979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-news","category-literature","category-off-topic","tag-american-mathematical-society","tag-financial-crisis","tag-hopf-fibration","tag-kervaire-invariant","tag-mathematics","tag-mixing","tag-netflix-prize","tag-numeracy","tag-promotion","tag-quantum-chaos","tag-weinstein-conjecture","tag-whats-happening"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/979\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danamackenzie.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}