Steven Strogatz

Should you watch public television without pledging?...Exceed the posted speed limit?...Hop a subway turnstile without paying? These questions illustrate the so-called "prisoner's dilemma", a social puzzle that we all face every day. Though the answers may seem simple, their profound implications make the prisoner's dilemma one of the great unifyin...

The full inside story of the detection of gravitational waves at LIGO, one of the most ambitious feats in scientific history.Travel around the world 100 billion times. A strong gravitational wave will briefly change that distance by less than the thickness of a human hair. We have perhaps less than a few tenths of a second to perform this measureme...

National BestsellerWinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography A New York Times Notable BookWinner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science/Subaru Science Books & Film Prize for Excellence in Science BooksFinalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing AwardOne of the Best Books of the Year: The Wa...

Spanning the years from WWII, when he was a civilian statistician in the operations research section of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command, thru his studies with Hans Bethe at Cornell University, his early friendship with Richard Feynman & his postgraduate work with J. Robert Oppenheimer, Freeman Dyson has composed an autobiography unlike any other...

as anywhere today, it is becoming more d- ficult to tell the truth. To be sure, our store of accurate facts is more plentiful now than it has ever been, and the minutest details of history are being thoroughly recorded. Scientists, - men and scholars vie with each other in publishing excruciatingly definitive accounts of all that happens on the nat...

Creativity isn't born, it's cultivated—this innovative guide distills the work of extraordinary artists and thinkers to show you how. All the imagination needs to be fruitful is exercise. Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein identify the thinking tools employed by history's greatest creative minds—from Albert Einstein and Jane Goodall to Amadeus Mozar...

The triumphant vindication of bold theories-are these not the pride and justification of our life's work? -Sherlock Holmes, The Valley of Fear Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The main purpose of our book is to present and explain mathematical methods for obtaining approximate analytical solutions to differential and difference equations that cannot be solve...

This textbook is designed for students. Rather than the typical definition-theorem-proof-repeat style, this text includes much more commentary, motivation and explanation. The proofs are not terse, and aim for understanding over economy. Furthermore, dozens of proofs are preceded by "scratch work" or a proof sketch to give students a big-picture vi...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The compelling, inspiring, and comically sublime story of one man's coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followedNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Michiko Kakutani, New York Times - USA Today - San Francisco Chronicle - NPR - Esquire - Newsday - BooklistT...

More than three centuries after its creation, calculus remains a dazzling intellectual achievement and the gateway to higher mathematics. This book charts its growth and development by sampling from the work of some of its foremost practitioners, beginning with Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the late seventeenth century and continuin...