When Mr Ruche, a reclusive Parisian bookseller, receives a letter from a long lost friend in the Amazon bequesting him a vast library of mathematical books, he is propelled into a great exploration of the story of maths, from brilliant Greek thinkers, such as Archimedes and Pythagoras, to the modern-day genius Fermat. Meanwhile Max, a deaf boy whose dysfunctional family live with Mr Ruche, finds a voluble parrot in a local fleamarket. He turns out to be a bird who discusses maths with anyone who will listen. So when Mr Ruche learns of his friend's mysterious death in the rainforests of Brazil he decides that with the parrot's help he will use these books to teach Max and his twin brother and sister the mysteries and wonders of numbers and shapes. Charming, fresh, with a narrative which races along, the novel takes the reader on a delightful journey through the history of mathematics.

A "skillful and literate" ( New York Times Book Review ) biography of the persecuted genius who helped create the modern computer. To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As an openly gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in England, he was convicted and forced to undergo a humiliating "treatment" that may have led to his suicide. With a novelist's sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity?his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candor?and elegantly explains his work and its implications.

Boyds Mills Press publishes a wide range of high-quality fiction and nonfiction picture books, chapter books, novels, and nonfiction

" A comic, bittersweet tale of family evocative of The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Everything Is Illuminated Alexander "Sasha" Karnokovitch and his family would like to mourn the passing of his mother, Rachela, with modesty and dignity. But Rachela, a famous Polish e;migre; mathematician and professor at the University of Wisconsin, is rumored to have solved the million-dollar, Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem. Rumor also has it that she spitefully took the solution to her grave. To Sasha's chagrin, a ragtag group of socially challenged mathematicians arrives in Madison and crashes the shiva, vowing to do whatever it takes to find the solution-even if it means prying up the floorboards for Rachela's notes. Written by a trained geophysicist, this hilarious and multi-layered debut novel brims with colorful characters and brilliantly captures humanity's drive not just to survive, but to solve the impossible"--

When in May 1930, the Council of Trinity College, Cambridge, had to decide whether to renew Wittgenstein's research grant, it turned to Bertrand Russell for an assessment of the work Wittgenstein had been doing over the past year. His verdict: "The theories contained in this new work . . . are novel, very original and indubitably important. Whether they are true, I do not know. As a logician who likes simplicity, I should like to think that they are not, but from what I have read of them I am quite sure that he ought to have an opportunity to work them out, since, when completed, they may easily prove to constitute a whole new philosophy." "["Philosophical Remarks] contains the seeds of Wittgenstein's later philosophy of mind and of mathematics. Principally, he here discusses the role of indispensable in language, criticizing Russell's "The Analysis of Mind. He modifies the "Tractatus's picture theory of meaning by stressing that the connection between the proposition and reality is not found in the picture itself. He analyzes generality in and out of mathematics, and the notions of proof and experiment. He formulates a pain/private-language argument and discusses both behaviorism and the verifiability principle. The work is difficult but important, and it belongs in every philosophy collection."--Robert Hoffman, "Philosophy "Any serious student of Wittgenstein's work will want to study his Philosophical Remarks as a transitional book between his two great masterpieces. The Remarks is thus indispensible for anyone who seeks a complete understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy."--Leonard Linsky, American Philosophical Association

The numerical, discrete element, Discontinuous Deformation Analysis (DDA) method was developed by Dr. Gen-hua Shi while he was working at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Prof. Richard E. Goodman in the late 1980s. Two-dimensional DDA was published in 1993 and three-dimensional DDA in 2001. Since its publication DDA has been verified, validated and applied in numerous studies worldwide and is now considered a powerful and robust method to address both static and dynamic engineering problems in discontinuous rock masses. In this book Yossef H. Hatzor and Guowei Ma, co-chairs of the International Society for Rock Mechanics (ISRM) Commission on DDA, join Dr. Shi in authoring a monograph that presents the state of the art in DDA research. A comprehensive discussion of DDA development since its publication is provided in Chapter 1, followed by concise reviews of 2D and 3D DDA in chapters 2 and 3. Procedures to select geological and numerical input parameters for DDA are discussed in Chapter 4, and DDA validation and verification is presented in Chapter 5. Applications of DDA in underground and rock slope engineering projects are discussed in chapters 6 and 7. In Chapter 8 the novel contact theory recently developed by Dr. Shi is published in its complete form, for the first time. This book is published within the framework of the ISRM Book Series and is the contribution of the ISRM DDA Commission to the international rock mechanics community.