Bøger af Dana Mackenzie

A Turing Award-winning computer scientist and statistician shows how understanding causality has revolutionized science and will revolutionize artificial intelligence"e;Correlation is not causation."e; This mantra, chanted by scientists for more than a century, has led to a virtual prohibition on causal talk. Today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, instigated by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and established causality--the study of cause and effect--on a firm scientific basis. His work explains how we can know easy things, like whether it was rain or a sprinkler that made a sidewalk wet; and how to answer hard questions, like whether a drug cured an illness. Pearl's work enables us to know not just whether one thing causes another: it lets us explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It shows us the essence of human thought and key to artificial intelligence. Anyone who wants to understand either needs The Book of Why.

The first popular book to explain the dramatic theory behind the Moon's genesisThis lively science history relates one of the great recent breakthroughs in planetary astronomy-a successful theory of the birth of the Moon. Science journalist Dana Mackenzie traces the evolution of this theory, one little known outside the scientific community: a Mars-sized object collided with Earth some four billion years ago, and the remains of this colossal explosion-the Big Splat-came together to form the Moon. Beginning with notions of the Moon in ancient cosmologies, Mackenzie relates the fascinating history of lunar speculation, moving from Galileo and Kepler to George Darwin (son of Charles) and the Apollo astronauts, whose trips to the lunar surface helped solve one of the most enigmatic mysteries of the night sky: who hung the Moon?Dana Mackenzie (Santa Cruz, CA) is a freelance science journalist. His articles have appeared in such magazines as Science, Discover, American Scientist, The Sciences, and New Scientist.

Features a rich selection of articles about recent topics in pure and applied mathematics. Coverage includes new developments in the theory of expander graphs and in number theory, a solution of the so-called Cap Set Conjecture, a statement about arithmetic progressions in finite vector spaces, and recent advances in theoretical computer science.

Offers a collection of articles highlighting some of the most recent developments in mathematics. Articles include "Prime Clusters and Gaps: Out-Experting the Experts", and "The Kadison-Singer Problem: A Fine Balance"; "Climate Past, Present, and Future" and "The Truth Shall Set Your Fee".