Aspiring bakers will embrace this charming picture book about baking pie by using simple math, from one of the world's most creative and celebrated mathematicians.
X + Y are dreaming of baking infinite pie. But they don't know if infinite pie is real. With the help of quirky and uber-smart Aunt Z, and a whole lot of flour and butter, X and Y will learn that by using math they can bake their way to success!
This charming and tasty story from mathematician and author of How to Bake Pi, Eugenia Cheng, reassures young readers that math doesn't have to be scary-especially when paired with pie!
Additional back matter includes: a letter from Eugenia encouraging readers not to be intimidated by math, explanations of the math concepts explored in the book, and a recipe for Banana Butterscotch Pie!
How both logical and emotional reasoning can help us live better in our post-truth world
In a world where fake news stories change election outcomes, has rationality become futile? In The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, Eugenia Cheng throws a lifeline to readers drowning in the illogic of contemporary life. Cheng is a mathematician, so she knows how to make an airtight argument. But even for her, logic sometimes falls prey to emotion, which is why she still fears flying and eats more cookies than she should. If a mathematician can't be logical, what are we to do? In this book, Cheng reveals the inner workings and limitations of logic, and explains why alogic--for example, emotion--is vital to how we think and communicate. Cheng shows us how to use logic and alogic together to navigate a world awash in bigotry, mansplaining, and manipulative memes. Insightful, useful, and funny, this essential book is for anyone who wants to think more clearly.
The hilarious and charming Eugenia Cheng leads us in search of what's bigger than infinity, and smaller than its opposite
Imagine something small enough to fit in your head but too large to fit in the world-or even the universe. What would you call it? And what would it be? How about...infinity?
In Beyond Infinity, musician, chef, and mathematician Eugenia Cheng answers this question by taking readers on a startling journey from math at its most elemental to its loftiest abstractions. Beginning with the classic thought experiment of Hilbert's hotel-the place where you can (almost) always find a room, if you don't mind being moved from room to room over the course of the night-she explores the wild and woolly world of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. Along the way she considers weighty questions like why some numbers are uncountable or why infinity plus one is not the same as one plus infinity. She finds insight in some unlikely examples: planning a dinner party for 7 billion people using a chessboard, making a chicken-sandwich sandwich, and creating infinite cookies from a finite ball of dough all tell you more about math than you could have imagined.
An irresistible book on the universe's biggest possible topic, Beyond Infinity will beguile and bewitch you, and show all of us how one little symbol can hold the biggest idea of all.
What is math? And how exactly does it work? In How to Bake Pi, math professor Eugenia Cheng provides an accessible introduction to the logic of mathematics— sprinkled throughout with recipes for everything from crispy duck to cornbread—that illustrates to the general reader the beauty of math. Rather than dwell on the math of our high school classes, with formulas to memorize and confusing symbols to decipher, Cheng takes us into a world of abstract mathematics, showing us how math can be so much more than we ever thought possible.
Cheng is an expert on category theory, a cutting-edge subject that is all about figuring out how math works, a kind of mathematics of mathematics. In How to Bake Pi, Cheng starts with the basic question “What is math?” to explain concepts like abstraction, generalization, and idealization. By going back to the logical foundation of the math we all know (and may or may not love), she shows that math is actually designed to make difficult things easier. From there, she introduces us to category theory, explaining how it works to organize and simplify the whole discipline of mathematics. The result is a book that combines some of the most satisfying features of popular math books while still looking long and hard into unexplored territory.
Through lively writing and easy-to-follow explanations, How to Bake Pi takes even the most hardened math-phobe on a journey to the cutting edge of mathematical research.
