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Exploring mathematics : an engaging introduction to proof

Exploring Mathematics gives students experience with doing mathematics - interrogating mathematical claims, exploring definitions, forming conjectures, attempting proofs, and presenting results - and engages them with examples, exercises, and projects that pique their interest. Written with a minimal number of pre-requisites, this text can be used by college students in their first and second years of study, and by independent readers who want an accessible introduction to theoretical mathematics. Core topics include proof techniques, sets, functions, relations, and cardinality, with selected additional topics that provide many possibilities for further exploration. With a problem-based approach to investigating the material, students develop interesting examples and theorems through numerous exercises and projects. In-text exercises, with complete solutions or robust hints included in an appendix, help students explore and master the topics being presented. The end-of-chapter exercises and projects provide students with opportunities to confirm their understanding of core material, learn new concepts, and develop mathematical creativity.

The illusion of linearity [electronic resource] : from analysis to improvement

This book presents the reader with a comprehensive overview of the major findings of the recent research on the illusion of linearity. It discusses: how the illusion of linearity appears in diverse domains of mathematics and science; what are the crucial psychological, mathematical, and educational factors being responsible for the occurrence and persistence of the phenomenon; and how the illusion of linearity can be remedied.

Online Ebook Central

Associative functions : triangular norms and copulas

The dynamics of complex systems can clarify the creation of structures in Nature. This creation is driven by the collective interaction of constitutive elements of the system. Such interactions are frequently nonlinear and are directly responsible for the lack of prediction in the evolution process. The self-organization accompanying these processes occurs all around us and is constantly being rediscovered, under the guise of a new jargon, in apparently unrelated disciplines. This volume offers unique perspectives on aspects of fractals and complexity and, through the examination of complementary techniques, provides a unifying thread in this multidisciplinary endeavour. Do nonlinear interactions play a role in the complexity management of socio-economic-political systems? Is it possible to extract the global properties of genetic regulatory networks without knowing the details of individual genes? What can one learn by transplanting the self-organization effects known in laser processes to the study of emotions? What can the change in the level of complexity tell us about the physiological state of the organism? The reader will enjoy finding the answers to these questions and many more in this book.The functional equation of associativity is the topic of Abel's first contribution to Crelle's Journal. Seventy years later, it was featured as the second part of Hilbert's Fifth Problem, and it was solved under successively weaker hypotheses by Brouwer (1909), Cartan (1930) and Aczel (1949). In 1958, B Schweizer and A Sklar showed that the "triangular norms" introduced by Menger in his definition of a probabilistic metric space should be associative; and in their book Probabilistic Metric Spaces, they presented the basic properties of such triangular norms and the closely related copulas. Since then, the study of these two classes of functions has been evolving at an ever-increasing pace and the results have been applied in fields such as statistics, information theory, fuzzy set theory, multi-valued and quantum logic, hydrology, and economics, in particular, risk analysis.This book presents the foundations of the subject of associative functions on real intervals. It brings together results that have been widely scattered in the literature and adds much new material. In the process, virtually all the standard techniques for solving functional equations in one and several variables come into play. Thus, the book can serve as an advanced undergraduate or graduate text on functional equations.

Online EBSCO Academic Comprehensive Collection