During the final exam week of college, when reviewing advanced math, it is common to hear a helpless joke, "From here to here, it took mathematicians five hundred years, and we only have five days." Although this is just a complaint from college students about paying the price of daily laziness, it is inevitable that people can't help but wonder about the development of mathematics, how these complex and concise symbols have become the best tool for explaining the world through the efforts of generations of mathematicians.
I think the book "The Garden of Crossed Paths" might give you an answer to the question of where this knowledge comes from in addition to using mathematics. At the same time, you will discover that mathematics can be so interesting.
The author of this book, Wang Yahui, has multiple identities. He is a core player with 20 years of game experience, as an independent game developer for game development, as early as high school for Nokia mobile phone development games, college in the United States to study computer science, animation industry entrepreneur.
This book tells the history of the development of human mathematics in chronological order. As an expert in game research, the author Wang Yahui uses gamification thinking to explore the history of mathematical exploration. The main text of the book is divided into seven chapters: "The Birth of Number", "The Mathematical Chapter Opened by the Pythagorean Theorem", "The Aristocracy, the University and the Algebraic Age", "The Century of Genius", "The War of Calculus", "The World After Calculus", and "The World of Mathematics in the 19th Century".
From the ancient man who knotted his fingers in the cave to the Egyptian sage who built the pyramids; From Pythagoras and his disciples, who thought about mathematics and life by the Aegean Sea, to Zhang Cang, who was dressed in Chinese clothes and arranged calculations; From the anonymous man who counted silently under the rule of the Roman Empire to the monk who tirelessly copied the wisdom of his predecessors in the church. The story of the legend is told around the bonfire of civilization.
Descartes, Fermat, Pascal, Newton, Leibniz, Gauss, Euler, Ramanujan, 、..The gilded name is sung by word of mouth.
Different from the traditional model of books about the development of mathematics in the past, the author Wang Yahui reversed the proportion of the two in the process of writing, and in this way, the book successfully has the two most important elements of popular science books: readability and education.
A large number of simple and playful words not only attract the attention of readers, so that they have the motivation to continue reading, but also let the mathematical knowledge wrapped under it shine under the background, so that it can imperceptibly enter the reader's memory, so that readers can get the dual enjoyment of reading experience and knowledge learning.
For primary and secondary school students, this book can help them build a love for mathematics in advance and leave an impression in their minds about what they will learn in the future. For college students, this book can help them relieve the pain of boring high math study, and have a topic to talk about when they go to the library with their classmates during the final week; For people in society, this book can not only help them escape the stress of work for a short time, but also allow them to inadvertently send fragments of knowledge that can evoke the memories of the green era when reading, and thus make a laugh of memories and feelings.