Seize Your Copy Mathematics And The Real World: The Remarkable Role Of Evolution In The Making Of Mathematics Composed By Zvi Artstein Ready In Audiobook

titolo di questo libro è un po' fuorviante, sia in italiano che nell'originale inglese, Quello che Artstein intende davvero fare è raccontare in maniera divertente, tra l'altro come lui pensa che si dovrebbe insegnare la matematica.
Per farlo, però, non segue un percorso diretto ma comincia con quella che sembra una storia delle conquiste matematiche non "della matematica", notate facendo varie digressioni per esempio sul calcolo delle probabilità.
Le conquiste però vengono viste pensando a cosa sia "facile" e "difficile" per il nostro cervello, che si è evoluto per sopravvivere in un ambiente dove il ragionamento logico e le inferenze probabilistiche non sono la via migliore per non essere mangiati da una tigre.
Ecco dunque che il formalismo logico è per Artstein fondamentale per essere sicuri che le nostre basi siano solide, ma non è quello che usiamo per capire le cose, né tanto meno possiamo usarlo per impararle.
Purtroppo nella traduzione di Simonetta Frediani sono rimaste alcune imprecisioni che in certi punti rendono più complicata la lettura.
Ah: Artstein è israeliano, e nel testo i risultati dei suoi connazionali hanno un rilievo simile a quello del Popov che nelle barzellette sull'Unione Sovietica aveva inventato tutto.
. . don't waste your money

Poorly written, Images are missing and equations and symbols are not legible in Kindle version, I suffered through to the end!,AThis book feels like Artstein first wrote a general history of mathematics, but his publisher insisted that he take a new angle to make the book more marketable and thus evolution was grafted on sloppily to the rest of the text.
That aspect was a complete afterthought to an otherwise serviceable but mostly uninspired chronicle of major math milestones, movements, and figures.
Can't recommend. The subtitle of this book is highly misleading, Artstein seems to be promising a book that looks at sitelinkhow evolution might have played a role in the human brain becoming able to do mathematics, or examines sitelinkif mathematics is an innate talent vs.
a learned skill, or perhaps considers the sort of sitelinkreal world problems and pressures that drove the development of sitelinkmathematical thought throughout history.
As he explains it

“The discussion will be accompanied by the constant presence of the question regarding the extent of the effect of the evolution of the human race on the development of mathematics and its applications.
”

Instead, you mainly get a very brief history of mathematics from the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, through Isaac Newton to modern physics.
Then there's a few chapters on sitelinkprobability and sitelinkthe theory of computation, and he wraps up by looking briefly at the sitelinkattempts to put all mathematics on a rigorous foundation, sitelinkhow math research is done and sitelinkwhether mathematics can be taught better.
Evolution makes only a cameo appearance in the very first chapter,

To add insult to injury, when sitelinkevolution is mentioned, Artstein gets it all wrong.
Artstein presents evolution as Lamarckian, with learned knowledge somehow inherited genetically for an underlying purpose of progress or improvement.
He also seems to think it works on an entire species all at once instead of individual members of a species passing on traits to their individual offspring.
This is the sitelinklateth century misunderstanding of evolution that prevailed until genetics were discovered to explain natural selection.
Granted, he's a mathematics professor, not an evolutionary biologist, but wasn't just a little sitelinkresearch into the subject he's purportedly writing about warranted Presenting such a sitelinknaive and outdated understanding does his readers no favors.


The point of all this digression seems to be the final chapter, where Artstein tries to show that it would be better to teach mathematics in a more intuitive manner, since sitelinkeveryone seems to have a basic sense of number.
There are much better books out there on sitelinkteaching and sitelinklearning sitelinkmathematics that sitelinkdon't take such a meandering and sitelinkconfusing path to get to their point.
Starts off interestingly enough, but as the book goes on, there is less and less about the role of evolution and more and more just straight math history.
It was an OK read, but disappointing overall, In this accessible and illuminating study of how

the science of mathematics developed, a veteran math researcher and educator looks at the ways in which  our evolutionary makeup is both a help and a hindrance to the study of math.


Artstein chronicles the discovery of important mathematical connections between mathematics and the real world from ancient times to the present.
The author then describes some of the contemporary applications of mathematicsin probability theory, in the study of human behavior, and in combination with computers, which give mathematics unprecedented power.


The author concludes with an insightful discussion of why mathematics, for most people, is so frustrating.
He argues that the rigorous logical structure of math goes against the grain of our predisposed ways of thinking as shaped by evolution, presumably because the talent needed to cope with logical mathematics gave the human race as a whole no evolutionary advantage.
With this in mind, he offers ways to overcome these innate impediments in the teaching of math.
.