Booked by HooksBookEvents: Thursday, June 10, 2010
Book: A Mathematical Nature Walk
Author: John A. Adam, Ph.D.
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2009
Click Here to see John Adam’s speech at Noblis’ Technology Tuesdays
About the Author – John A. Adam is professor of mathematics at Old Dominion University. He is the coauthor of “Guesstimation: Solving the World’s Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin” and the author of “Mathematics in Nature” (both Princeton). He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Rochester (NY) in the Department of Mechanical Engineering prior to joining Old Dominion University in 1984. His research covers a variety of areas, including astrophysical fluid dynamics, agnetohydrodynamics, and singular differential equations.
During the last 15 years, Dr. Adam has been involved in mathematical biology,
specifically developing mathematical models of tumor growth and metastasis, and mathematical models for wound healing in bone. He is currently working on mathematical models of atmospheric optical phenomena, such as rainbows, halos and glories. He has published 87 papers in scientific and mathematical journals.
About the Book – How tall is that tree? How far away is that cloud, and how heavy is it? Why are the droplets on that spider web spaced apart so evenly? If you have ever asked questions like these while outdoors, and wondered how you might figure out the answers, this is a book for you. An entertaining and nformative collection of fascinating puzzles from the natural world around us, A Mathematical Nature Walk will delight anyone who loves nature or math or both.
John Adam presents ninety-six questions about many common natural phenomena—and a few uncommon ones—and then shows how to answer them using mostly basic mathematics. Can you weigh a pumpkin just by carefully looking at it? Why can you see farther in rain than in fog? What causes the variations in the colors of butterfly wings, bird feathers, and oil slicks? And why are large haystacks prone to spontaneous combustion? These are just a few of the questions you’ll find inside.
Many of the problems are illustrated with photos and drawings, and the book also has answers, a glossary of terms, and a list of some of the patterns found in nature. About a quarter of the questions can be answered with arithmetic, and many of the rest require only precalculus. But regardless of math background, readers will learn from the informal descriptions of the problems and gain a new appreciation of the beauty of nature and the mathematics that lies behind it.