Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Negative Math: How Mathematical Rules Can Be Positively Bent

Negative Math: How Mathematical Rules Can Be Positively Bent

Martínez, Alberto A.

Paperback

AlgebraGeneral Mathematics

ISBN10: 0691133913
ISBN13: 9780691133911
Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr
Published: Jan 5 2014
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.87
Height: 0.59 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

A student in class asks the math teacher: Shouldn't minus times minus make minus? Teachers soon convince most students that it does not. Yet the innocent question brings with it a germ of mathematical creativity. What happens if we encourage that thought, odd and ungrounded though it may seem?

Few books in the field of mathematics encourage such creative thinking. Fewer still are engagingly written and fun to read. This book succeeds on both counts. Alberto Martinez shows us how many of the mathematical concepts that we take for granted were once considered contrived, imaginary, absurd, or just plain wrong. Even today, he writes, not all parts of math correspond to things, relations, or operations that we can actually observe or carry out in everyday life.


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