Afterword - The Remarkable Role of Evolution in the Making of Mathematics - Mathematics and the Real World

Mathematics and the Real World: The Remarkable Role of Evolution in the Making of Mathematics (2014)

Afterword

The reader will certainly have noticed the oft-repeated claim in the book that evolution did not prepare us for entirely error-free rigorous analysis and discussion. I would ask readers to treat any errors that they will almost certainly find in the book in that spirit.

Sources

The author is wholly and solely responsible for the facts and opinions in the book. Nonetheless, the book could not have been written without reference to numerous sources, including books mentioned in the following bibliography. In the bibliography, interested readers will find popular essays, as well as books that will expand on some of the subjects and on the personalities mentioned herein.

Aczel, Amir D. The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity. New York: Washington Square Press, 2000.

———. Descartes's Secret Notebook: A True Tale of Mathematics, Mysticism, and the Quest to Understand the Universe. New York: Broadway Books, 2005.

Adams, William J. The Life and Times of the Central Limit Theorem. 2nd ed. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 2009.

Bertsch McGrayne, Sharon. The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.

Bochner, Salomon. The Role of Mathematics in the Rise of Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966.

Blackmore, Susan. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Boyer, Carl B. The History of the Calculus and Its Conceptual Development. New York: Dover Publications, 1959.

Cohen, Bernard I. The Birth of a New Physics. Revised and updated. New York: W. W. Norton, 1985.

Coyne, Jerry A. Why Evolution Is True. New York: Viking Penguin Group, 2009.

Crease, Robert P. The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009.

Davis, Philip J., and Reuben Hersh. The Mathematical Experience. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Birkhäuser, 1981.

Dehaene, Stanislas. The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Devlin, Keith. The Math Gene: How Mathematical Thinking Evolved and Why Numbers Are Like Gossip. New York: Basic Books, Perseus Books Group, 2000.

———. The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter That Made the World Modern. New York: Basic Books, Perseus Books Group, 2008.

Dixit, Avinash K., and Barry J. Nalebuff. The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

Drake, Stillman. Galileo: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

du Sautoy, Marcus. The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

———. Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.

Ekeland, Ivar. Mathematics and the Unexpected. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Eves, Howard. An Introduction to the History of Mathematics. 3rd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969.

Forbes, Nancy, and Basil Mahon. Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2014.

Gessen, Masha. Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

Gigerenzer, Gerd. Reckoning with Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty. London: Penguin Books, 2002.

Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Harel, David. Computers Ltd.: What They Really Can't Do. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Harel, David, with Yishai Feldman. Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing. 3rd ed. Harlow, UK: Addison-Wesley, Pearson Education, 2004.

Hoffman, Paul. The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth. New York: Hyperion, 1998.

Huntly, H. E. The Divine Proportion: A Study in Mathematical Beauty. New York: Dover Publications, 1970.

Isaacson, Walter. Einstein: His Life and Universe. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007.

Israel, Georgio, and Ana Millán Gasca. The World as a Mathematical Game: John von Neumann and Twentieth Century Science. Boston: Birkhäuser, 2009.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Kline, Morris. Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972.

———. Why Johnny Can't Add: The Failure of the New Math. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973.

———. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

———. Mathematics and the Search for Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Koestler, Arthur. The Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler. London: Heinemann Educational, 1961.

Lanczos, Cornelius. The Einstein Decade (1905–1915). New York: Academic Press, 1974.

Liberman, Varda, and Amos Tversky. Statistical Reasoning and Intuitive Judgment (in Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Open University of Israel, 1996.

Livio, Mario. The Golden Ratio: The Story Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number. New York: Broadway Books, 2002.

Magee, Bryan. The Great Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Mahon, Basil. The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell. Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons, 2003.

Mangel, Marc, and Colin W. Clark. Dynamic Modeling in Behavioral Ecology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Monk, Ray. Russell. London: Phoenix, 1987.

Nagel, Ernest, and James R. Newman. Gödel's Proof. New York: New York University Press, 1960.

Ne'eman, Yuval, and Yoram Kirsh. The Particle Hunters: The Search after the Fundamental Constituents of Matter (in Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Massada, 1983.

Netz, Reviel, and William Noel. The Archimedes Codex: Revealing the Secrets of the World's Greatest Palimpsest. London: Phoenix, 2007.

Rudman, Peter S. How Mathematics Happened: The First 50,000 Years. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007.

Ruelle, David. The Mathematician's Brain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Saari, Donald G. Decisions and Elections: Expecting the Unexpected. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Singh, Simon. Fermat's Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle That Confounded the World's Greatest Minds for 358 Years. London: Fourth Estate, 1998.

———. The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography. New York: Anchor Books, Random House, 2000.

Swetz, Frank J., and T. I. Kao. Was Pythagoras Chinese? University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977.

van der Warden, B. L. Science Awakening. Translated into English by Arnold Dresden. Groningen: Noordhoff, 1954.

Wilson, Robin. Four Colors Suffice: How the Map Problem Was Solved. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Yavetz, Ido. Wandering Stars and Ethereal Spheres: Landmarks in the History of Greek Astronomy (in Hebrew). Or Yehuda, Israel: Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan, Dvir, 2010.