princeton university press jul 2012 (12 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Across the Board is not simply about chess but the chessboard itself and the fascinating mathematics behind it. John Watkins surveys all the well-known problems in this surprisingly fertile area of recreational mathematics. Many beautiful solutions have emerged for basic chessboard problems since mathematicians first began working on them in earnest over three centuries ago. But now such problems have been extended to three-dimensional chessboards and even chessboards on unusual surfaces such as toruses (the equivalent of playing chess on a doughnut) and cylinders. Across the Board will captivate students and instructors, mathematicians, chess enthusiasts, and puzzle devotees.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Everybody knows that mathematics is indispensable to physics. But how many people realize that physics can be used to produce many astonishing and strikingly elegant solutions in mathematics Mark Levi shows how in this delightful book, treating readers to a host of entertaining problems and mind-bending puzzlers that will amuse and inspire their inner physicist. The Mathematical Mechanic will appeal to anyone interested in the little-known connections between mathematics and physics and how both endeavors relate to the world around us.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - What are your chances of dying on your next flight, being called for jury duty, or winning the lottery In this collection of twenty-one puzzles, Paul Nahin challenges us to think creatively about the laws of probability as they apply in playful, sometimes deceptive, ways to a fascinating array of speculative situations. Written in an informal way and containing a plethora of interesting historical material, Duelling Idiots is ideal for those who are fascinated by mathematics and the role it plays in everyday life and in our imaginations.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - When is a landscape more than a landscape This is a richly illustrated study of an important genre of Ming-dynasty Chinese painting in which landscapes are actually disguised portraits that celebrate an individual and his achievements, ambitions, and tastes in an open effort to win recognition, support, and social status. In this unique study, Anne de Coursey Clapp presents a broad view of these commemorative landscape paintings, including antecedents in the Song and Yuan dynasties.The book traces how in commemorative landscape painting members of the literati address their peers in a deeply familiar language of values, just as they had for centuries through literary biography. Although the setting for such pictures is always natural landscape, it is secondary to the man, and its true function is to mirror him as the humanistic ideal of the recluse-scholar. The book shows how the literary associations attached to the new landscape increased during the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), when the first commemorative paintings appeared, and flourished through the Ming (1368-1644), producing an art form that was simultaneously pictorial and verbal. In the course of exploring the sources and meaning of these paintings, the book examines several varieties of dedicatory paintings, including departure paintings, and the interesting subgenre of 'biehao,' in which portrait subjects are symbolized through pictorial representations of their literary names.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Through biographies of China's most colorful and famous personalities, John Wills displays the five-thousand-year sweep of Chinese history from the legendary sage emperors to the tragedy of Tiananmen Square. This unique introduction to Chinese history and culture uses more than twenty exemplary lives--biographies of China's most colorful and famous personalities--including those of statesmen, philosophers, poets, and rulers, to provide the focus for accounts of key historical trends and periods. What emerges is a provocative rendering of China's moral landscape, featuring characters who have resonated in the historical imagination as examples of villainy, heroism, wisdom, spiritual vision, political guile, and complex combinations of all of these.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Since its first publication more than twenty-five years ago, How to Build a Habitable Planet has established a legendary reputation as an accessible yet scientifically impeccable introduction to the origin and evolution of Earth, from the Big Bang through the rise of human civilization. This classic account of how our habitable planet was assembled from the stuff of stars introduced readers to planetary, Earth, and climate science by way of a fascinating narrative. Now this great book has been made even better. Harvard geochemist Charles Langmuir has worked closely with the original author, Wally Broecker, one of the world's leading Earth scientists, to revise and expand the book for a new generation of readers for whom active planetary stewardship is becoming imperative.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The end of apartheid in 1994 signaled a moment of freedom and a promise of a nonracial future. With this promise came an injunction: define yourself as you truly are, as an individual, and as a community. Almost two decades later it is clear that it was less the future than the habits and horizons of anxious life in racially defined enclaves that determined post-apartheid freedom. In this book, Thomas Blom Hansen offers an in-depth analysis of the uncertainties, dreams, and anxieties that have accompanied post-apartheid freedoms in Chatsworth, a formerly Indian township in Durban. Exploring five decades of township life, Hansen tells the stories of ordinary Indians whose lives were racialized and framed by the township, and how these residents domesticated and inhabited this urban space and its institutions, during apartheid and after.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Stephen Simpson and David Raubenheimer provide a comprehensive theoretical approach to the analysis of nutrition--the Geometric Framework. They show how it can help us to understand the links between nutrition and the biology of individual animals, including the physiological mechanisms that determine the nutritional interactions of the animal with its environment, and the consequences of these interactions in terms of health, immune responses, and lifespan. Simpson and Raubenheimer explain how these effects translate into the collective behavior of groups and societies, and in turn influence food webs and the structure of ecosystems. Then they demonstrate how the Geometric Framework can be used to tackle issues in applied nutrition, such as the problem of optimizing diets for livestock and endangered species, and how it can also help to address the epidemic of human obesity and metabolic disease. Drawing on a wealth of examples from slime molds to humans, The Nature of Nutrition has important applications in ecology, evolution, and physiology, and offers promising solutions for human health, conservation, and agriculture.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'This is a brilliant and highly original investigation of how Cold War politics shaped the emergence of world literature and new forms of cultural authority, literary consecration, and political surveillance in the aftermath of the Second World War. Eye-opening and provocative, Archives of Authority is indispensable reading for all serious scholars of world literature, Cold War cultural politics, and globalization.'--Anne McClintock, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Touching on issues of power, authority, and domination, Manhunts takes an in-depth look at the hunting of humans in the West, from ancient Sparta, through the Middle Ages, to the modern practices of chasing undocumented migrants. Incorporating historical events and philosophical reflection, Grégoire Chamayou examines the systematic and organized search for individuals and small groups on the run because they have defied authority, committed crimes, seemed dangerous for simply existing, or been categorized as subhuman or dispensable. An unconventional history on an unconventional subject, Manhunts is an in-depth consideration of the dynamics of an age-old form of violence.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This is a thoroughly revised, updated, and expanded edition of a classic illustrated introduction to the structural materials in natural organisms and what we can learn from them to improve man-made technolog---from nanotechnology to textiles to architecture. Julian Vincent's book has long been recognized as a standard work on the engineering design of biomaterials and is used by undergraduates, graduates, researchers, and professionals studying biology, zoology, engineering, and biologically inspired design. This third edition incorporates new developments in the field, the most important of which have been at the molecular level. All of the illustrations have been redrawn, the references have been updated, and a new chapter on biomimetic design has been added.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Most studies of ancient Greek politics focus on formal institutions such as the political assembly and the law courts, and overlook the role that informal social practices played in the regulation of the political order. Sara Forsdyke argues, by contrast, that various forms of popular culture in ancient Greece--including festival revelry, oral storytelling, and popular forms of justice--were a vital medium for political expression and played an important role in the negotiation of relations between elites and masses, as well as masters and slaves, in the Greek city-states. Although these forms of social life are only poorly attested in the sources, Forsdyke suggests that Greek literature reveals traces of popular culture that can be further illuminated by comparison with later historical periods. By looking beyond institutional contexts, moreover, Forsdyke recovers the ways that groups that were excluded from the formal political sphere--especially women and slaves--participated in the process by which society was ordered.