Nature Books

Discover the amazing world of numbers and the real-world wonders they represent through creative, easy-to-understand infographics! 318,979,564,000: That's the average number of beats per minute of a hummingbird's heart. Colourful illustrated graphs, word clouds, pie charts, maps, photography, comparative images, and more illuminate the math behind statistics, trends, and measurements we encounter every day. Infographics cover popular subjects from science and technology to nature and wildlife, as well as everyday activities like sports and TV. Find fascinating Q&As with maths experts such as computer programmers, data artists, and more to show the many ways that maths is cool!

'Sync' is a perfect read for those interested in understanding complex mathematical themes such as self-organisation and spontaneous emergence of order out of chaos. The author seamlessly connects various applications to exemplify this theme, including human sleep and circadian rhythms, heart arrhythmias, and secret codes. The book has the potential to blow your mind and is highly recommended for those looking for some intellectual challenge.

Mazur (mathematics, Marlboro College), like many a mathematician before him, seeks the truth. How he goes about it is to examine three kinds of logic, those from the ancient Greeks, the strange logic of infinity, and the everyday, practical, plausible logic that basically drives most scientific inquiry today. In a series of 16 zippy chapters, Mazur looks into what logic actually is and how and when it shows up, the various configurations of infinity as they strike such disparate surfaces as set theory and irrational numbers, and the ordinary, everyday logic that underlies the math that may or may not reflect the real world. Mazur's appendices double as very well-explained exercises. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

The essence of the earth's beauty lies in chaos, in the disorder of grasses strewn in a meadow, the blotching of green lichen on a tree trunk. Eliot Porter's photographs of the natural world, spanning thirty-five years and five continents -- from an Antarctic ice floe to an American desert to an Icelandic lava field -- reveal in mesmerizing ways what scientists are beginning to see for themselves: the patterns, relations, and interactions present in nature's disorder and wildness. This is the perfect marriage of image and text -- brilliant full-color photographs by the preeminent nature photographer of his generation together with an illuminating essay by the widely praised author of Chaos.