276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Numbercrunch: A Mathematician's Toolkit for Making Sense of Your World

£8.495£16.99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Numbercrunch: A Mathematician’s Toolkit for Making Sense of Your World by Professor Oliver Johnson – eBook Details Professor Johnson said, "Baubles are notoriously fragile and Christmas decorations have a nasty habit of taking up too much space. So what's the most efficient way of storing festive spherical objects, which also applies to the Chocolate Orange, walnuts, Brussels sprouts, and even snowballs?

I am interested in the relationship between properties of entropy and limit theorems, such as the Central Limit Theorem and Law of Small Numbers (Poisson convergence). This includes trying to understand relationships between information-theoretic properties such as the Entropy Power Inequality and maximum entropy theorems and probabilistic ideas such as log-Sobolev inequalities and transportation of measure. I have a particular interest in developing discrete analogues of these results. I have recently been working on the group testing problem. This is a combinatorial search problem, which acts as a prototype of a wider class of sparse inference problems in estimation and statistics. I have developed the idea of rate and capacity of algorithms, and proved a range of theoretical performance guarantees for them in this sense. I am also interested in the idea of converse bounds: that is to show what performance is optimal. This has included recent work to extend the standard Fano-based bounds in statistical inference problems to a sharper criterion based on Renyi entropy. Regarded as ‘the perfect introduction to the power of mathematics – fluent, friendly and practical’ by Tom Harford, author of How to Make the World Add Up. David Spiegelhalter, author o f The Art of Statistics also referred to it as ‘A fine and valuable read. Johnson applies careful analysis and great common sense to an extraordinary range of applications of mathematical ideas, from football to filter bubbles – explaining formal ideas with minimum technicalities, and weighing their relevance to the real world.

Last on

So, if you want to save on wrapping paper, you should look for presents that are close to cubes – in shape that is, not sugar cubes though they might go down well with Santa’s reindeer. That’s another reason not to forget the Chocolate Orange – it should cost you less to wrap than a thin flat bar with the same amount of chocolate inside. Mathematical ideas can help in understanding sport. Recent years have seen a huge growth in teams using analytic methods to improve their performances, most famously in the Moneyball story of the Oakland Athletics baseball team in the US. In the UK, Brentford football club has used data science techniques to find and develop players and to adapt their tactics, and the team now lie in the top half of the English Premier League, despite having the smallest wage bill. Oliver Johnson reveals how mathematical thinking can help us understand the myriad data all around us. To whet your appetite for his wizardry, Professor Johnson has turned his mathematical mindset to the equally challenging problem of number crunching Christmas.

Watch out Martin Lewis, did you know Isaac Newton – who was even born on 25 th December – can save you money on wrapping paper? As well as giving equations for gravity, his laws of motion and calculus could reap real rewards.A clear, straightforward, informative guide to understanding numbers. I wish I'd read it years ago. * Tom Chivers, author of 'How to Read Numbers' * Oliver Johnson is a professor of information theory and director of the Institute for Statistical Science in the School of Mathematics at the University of Bristol. He was previously a research fellow at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Regarded as ‘the perfect introduction to the power of mathematics – fluent, friendly and practical’ by Tom Harford,author of How to Make the World Add Up.David Spiegelhalter, author o f The Art of Statisticsalso referred to it as ‘A fine and valuable read. Johnson applies careful analysis and great common sense to an extraordinary range of applications of mathematical ideas, from football to filter bubbles – explaining formal ideas with minimum technicalities, and weighing their relevance to the real world.'

Professor Johnson said, "Even if you've grown out of advent calendars, it's impossible to escape the importance of numbers at Christmas. For instance, if you get the timings wrong on defrosting your turkey or miscount the number of places needed at the dinner table, it's likely to cause some serious festive frustration. But there are also some lesser-known and rather intriguing ways math can make your celebrations a little merrier." What you'd like is a nice spread of baubles, without too many of the same color next to one another. It seems natural to try decorating the tree 'at random,' but this won't lead to a good effect. Suppose you have 100 baubles and 100 branches: if you just put each bauble on a randomly chosen branch, then more than a third (about 37%) of the branches will have no decorations at all, whereas some might well have as many as four baubles. It’s that time of year for the sinking feeling when you delve into the Christmas chocolate selection box and, as if by magic, pull out The One Which Nobody Likes. Last month brought the controversial news that Bounty chocolates have been excluded from a special edition of Celebrations, so that’s one less choc to worry about, but how exactly do the odds stand against us? Professor Johnson explained, "While it may be powerless to sweeten the pill, math can certainly help you understand what's going on. For example, what are the chances that the last chocolate left in the box is a nasty one? It's actually very simple: if our box has 24 nice chocolates and 6 nasty ones, there's a simple way to see the likelihood of the last one being nasty is 6/30, or 20%. That's the same chance that the first one is nasty, because you could imagine randomly pulling out all the chocolates and putting them in a long line—and then deciding which end of the line to start eating from. Similarly, there will be bare patches, just by random chance. In the same way, placing different coloured baubles randomly will tend to lead to two or three baubles of the same colour close together more often than we’d like. That means in fact, the best way to decorate your tree might be using a so-called quasi-random strategy, which lies somewhere between the very random and very structured extremes, and can be more pleasing on the eye.”An excellent, straightforward introduction to usefulness of numbers, which gets to the heart of why maths is so important to all of us.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment