A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market
by John Allen Paulos · 1 Jan 2003 · 295pp · 66,824 words
nothing to do with any interest one might have in prisoners’ rights. (In fact, it has about as much relevance to criminal justice as the four-color-map theorem has to geography.) Rather, it provides the logical skeleton for many situations we face in everyday life. Whether we’re negotiators in business, spouses
The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity
by Kwame Anthony Appiah · 27 Aug 2018 · 285pp · 83,682 words
prospect of upward or downward mobility. The connection between class and wealth, though complex, is indissoluble. You can start to see why class became the four-color-map problem of the social sciences. The more variables we try to account for, the harder it is to solve. Indeed, given the uncertainties about precisely
The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
by Mehrsa Baradaran · 14 Sep 2017 · 520pp · 153,517 words
across the country. The HOLC then used this data to create meticulous maps giving each metropolitan region and neighborhood across the country a value. These maps had four color categories based on perceived risk: A (green), B (blue), C (yellow), and D (red), green being the most desirable and red being the least
Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel
by Stephen Budiansky · 10 May 2021 · 406pp · 108,266 words
: it intimidates the students, and it inspires me.” An irrigation engineer in India and other self-taught amateurs sent him their supposed solutions to the four-color map problem, crackpot philosophical treatises, and (from an employee of an air-conditioning company) a proof that the Second Law of Thermodynamics implies the negation of
Prime Obsession:: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics
by John Derbyshire · 14 Apr 2003
to the equation xn + yn = zn when n is greater than 2, proved in 1994) was still open; so was the Four Color Theorem (that four colors are sufficient to color any map in the plane, no two adjacent regions having the same color, proved in 1976); so was Goldbach’s Conjecture (that every even
Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe
by Steven Strogatz · 31 Mar 2019 · 407pp · 116,726 words
but we have no insight into why. And at this point, the machines cannot explain themselves. Consider the famous long-standing math problem called the four-color map theorem. It says that under certain reasonable constraints, any map of contiguous countries can always be colored with just four colors such that no two
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, bounds of, 32 power series (area of circular segment), 190, 191 sine waves, derivative of, 258 velocity, 173 forward problem, 144–46, 175, 179–80 four-color map theorem, 293 Fourier, Jean Baptiste Joseph applications of work, 256 Fourier analysis, 267 heat flow, 249–52 string theory, 252–56 Fourier analysis, 267 Fourier
Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics
by David Berlinski · 2 Jan 2005 · 158pp · 49,168 words
four-color problem. Posed originally by Francis Guthrie in 1852, and then posed again by Arthur Caley in 1878, the four-color question asks whether four colors are sufficient to color any map so that contiguous regions all receive separate colors. The four-color answer—yes—was not received until 1976, when Kenneth Appel and
The Logician and the Engineer: How George Boole and Claude Shannon Created the Information Age
by Paul J. Nahin · 27 Oct 2012 · 229pp · 67,599 words
. But, nevertheless, there are particular maps for which three colors are enough. There is, alas, no efficient algorithm known that can distinguish between three-color and four-color maps, and so having a quantum computer available would be of no help. And even when a quantum algorithm is known, it may not result in
The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible
by Lance Fortnow · 30 Mar 2013 · 236pp · 50,763 words
do much better. In 1852 a South African mathematician, Francis Guthrie, was coloring a map of the counties of England and suspected that four colors would suffice to color any map so that two counties that border have different colors. Guthrie’s question was considered by various mathematicians of the time, and two “proofs
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mind, but many decades later no mistakes have been found in the Appel-Haken proof, and few today doubt that every map can be four-colored. Is four the limit? Can any map be colored with three colors? No. Consider Nevada and its neighbors. California, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, and Arizona form a ring around Nevada. Since
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, or yellow. So we need a fourth color, red, to color Nevada and its neighbors. There are computationally efficient algorithms for finding how to color a map with four colors based on proofs of the four-color theorem. The Frenemy researchers could then find a way to paint the houses of Frenemy with
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-2. U.S. Map. Take any map where there is some state surrounded by a ring of an odd number of other states and that map needs four colors. Here is a map of the provinces of Armenia. Figure 6-3. Armenia. There are only two provinces that lie entirely within Armenia. Kotayk
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. 1 (1967): 60–67. The Bacon number calculation is from the Internet Movie Database. For a readable story of the four-color problem, see Robin Wilson, Four Colors Suffice: How the Map Problem Was Solved (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). Chapter 4 The quotation from Cook is actually a paraphrase in modern terminology
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty
by Bradley K. Martin · 14 Oct 2004 · 1,509pp · 416,377 words
50 million tons. Unlike some nearby Russian ports, they boasted, the North Korean ports didn’t freeze up in winter. A slick brochure complete with four-color maps projected that the population of 131,000 North Koreans living in the vicinity of the two ports would grow into a modern industrial city of
In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation
by William J. Cook · 1 Jan 2011 · 245pp · 12,162 words
Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers
by Paulina Rowinska · 5 Jun 2024 · 361pp · 100,834 words
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
by Bill Bryson · 8 Sep 2010 · 331pp · 106,256 words
How the Mind Works
by Steven Pinker · 1 Jan 1997 · 913pp · 265,787 words
When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought
by Jim Holt · 14 May 2018 · 436pp · 127,642 words
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig · 14 Jul 2019 · 2,466pp · 668,761 words