Pluses and Minuses
How Math Solves Our Problems
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Pluses and Minuses
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Narrated by:
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René Ruiz
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By:
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Stefan Buijsman
About this listen
A guide to changing how you think about numbers and mathematics, from the prodigy changing the way the world thinks about math.
We all know math is important: We live in the age of big data, our lives are increasingly governed by algorithms, and we're constantly faced with a barrage of statistics about everything from politics to our health. But what might be less obvious is how math factors into your daily life and what memorizing all of those formulae in school had to do with it. Math prodigy Stefan Buijsman is beginning to change that through his pioneering research into the way we learn math. Pluses and Minuses is based in the countless ways that math is engrained in our daily lives, and it shows listeners how math can actually be used to make problems easier to solve. Taking listeners on a journey around the world to visit societies that have developed without the use of math, and back into history to learn how and why various disciples of mathematics were invented, Buijsman shows the vital importance of math and how a better understanding of mathematics will give us a better understanding of the world as a whole.
Stefan Buijsman has become one of the most sought-after experts in math education after he completed his PhD at age 20. In Pluses and Minuses, he puts his research into practice to help anyone gain a better grasp of mathematics than they have ever had.
©2020 Stefan Buijsman (P)2020 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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-
Infinite Powers
- How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe
- By: Steven Strogatz
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 688
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 564
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 559
Infinite Powers recounts how calculus tantalized and thrilled its inventors, starting with its first glimmers in ancient Greece and bringing us right up to the discovery of gravitational waves. Strogatz reveals how this form of math rose to the challenges of each age: how to determine the area of a circle with only sand and a stick; how to explain why Mars goes "backwards" sometimes; how to turn the tide in the fight against AIDS.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Not written to be read aloud
- By A Reader in Maine on 02-21-20
By: Steven Strogatz
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A Brief History of Infinity: The Quest to Think the Unthinkable
- Brief Histories
- By: Brian Clegg
- Narrated by: Gordon Griffin
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 41
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 35
Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.' Douglas Adams, Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.We human beings have trouble with infinity - yet infinity is a surprisingly human subject. Philosophers and mathematicians have gone mad contemplating its nature and complexity - yet it is a concept routinely used by schoolchildren. Exploring the infinite is a
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3 out of 5 stars
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Really not great in Audio, not great otherwise
- By Michael on 03-29-13
By: Brian Clegg
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The Great Mental Models
- General Thinking Concepts
- By: Shane Parrish
- Narrated by: Shane Parrish
- Length: 3 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,636
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 1,359
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,340
The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts is the first book in The Great Mental Models series designed to upgrade your thinking with the best, most useful and powerful tools so you always have the right one on hand. This volume details nine of the most versatile all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making, your productivity, and how clearly you see the world.
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2 out of 5 stars
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A dissapointing debut
- By Peter on 04-14-19
By: Shane Parrish
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Undeniable
- How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed
- By: Douglas Axe
- Narrated by: Neil Hellegers
- Length: 7 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 311
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 273
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 272
Throughout his distinguished and unconventional career, engineer-turned-molecular-biologist Douglas Axe has been asking the questions that much of the scientific community would rather silence. Now, he presents his conclusions in this brave and pioneering book. Axe argues that the key to understanding our origin is the "design intuition" - the innate belief held by all humans that tasks we would need knowledge to accomplish can be accomplished only by someone who has that knowledge.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Seductively Challenge what are consider facts
- By Rafael Vila on 10-08-16
By: Douglas Axe
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The Intelligent Web
- Search, Smart Algorithms, and Big Data
- By: Gautam Shroff
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 131
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 109
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Story4 out of 5 stars 107
As we use the Web for social networking, shopping, and news, we leave a personal trail. These days, linger over a Web page selling lamps, and they will turn up at the advertising margins as you move around the Internet, reminding you, tempting you to make that purchase. Search engines such as Google can now look deep into the data on the Web to pull out instances of the words you are looking for. And there are pages that collect and assess information to give you a snapshot of changing political opinion.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book for learning about Deep learning
- By Darkpassenger on 04-16-15
By: Gautam Shroff
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Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
- By: Daniel C. Dennett
- Narrated by: Jeff Crawford
- Length: 13 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 426
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 363
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Story4 out of 5 stars 357
Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking offers seventy-seven of Dennett’s most successful “imagination-extenders and focus-holders” meant to guide you through some of life’s most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Loved it, but some philosophy background needed.
- By LongerILiveLessIKnow on 11-14-13
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A Most Elegant Equation
- Euler’s Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics
- By: David Stipp
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 5 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 305
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 273
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Story4 out of 5 stars 270
Bertrand Russell wrote that mathematics can exalt "as surely as poetry". This is especially true of one equation: ei(pi) + 1 = 0, the brainchild of Leonhard Euler, the Mozart of mathematics. More than two centuries after Euler's death, it is still regarded as a conceptual diamond of unsurpassed beauty. Called Euler's identity, or God's equation, it includes just five numbers but represents an astonishing revelation of hidden connections.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Good treatment of the subject
- By Kindle Customer on 04-09-18
By: David Stipp
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In Pursuit of Elegance
- Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing
- By: Matthew E. May
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 66
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 31
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Story4 out of 5 stars 30
In this thought-provoking exploration, Matthew May defines elegance as the elusive combination of unusual simplicity and surprising power, and pinpoints the four key elements that characterize it: seduction, subtraction, symmetry, and sustainability. In a story-driven narrative that sheds light on the need for elegance in design, engineering, physics, art, urban planning, sports, and work, May offers a surprising array of stories that illustrate why what's "not there" often matters more than what is.
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1 out of 5 stars
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I love elegance, but this book isn't elegant
- By Oliver Nielsen on 06-26-11
By: Matthew E. May
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Thinking Machines
- The Quest for Artificial Intelligence - and Where It's Taking Us Next
- By: Luke Dormehl
- Narrated by: Gus Brown
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 61
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Story4 out of 5 stars 52
When most of us think about artificial intelligence, our minds go straight to cyborgs, robots, and sci-fi thrillers where machines take over the world. But the truth is that artificial intelligence is already among us. It exists in our smartphones, fitness trackers, and refrigerators that tell us when the milk will expire. In some ways the future people dreamed of at the World's Fair in the 1960s is already here. We're teaching our machines how to think like humans, and they're learning at an incredible rate.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Mostly platitudes with no depth
- By Gary on 03-24-17
By: Luke Dormehl
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Complexity
- The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
- By: M. Mitchell Waldrop
- Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 298
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 257
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 256
In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell--and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today.
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1 out of 5 stars
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You won't learn anything you didn't know
- By Dennis E. Alwine on 12-26-20
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The Smart Swarm
- By: Peter Miller
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 47
In a world where speed and flexibility are valued more than ever, leaders from the corporate boardroom to the military are looking for answers from seemingly unlikely experts - the ones in the grass, in the air, in the lakes, and in the woods. In this innovative audiobook, veteran National Geographic editor Peter Miller shows how swarm species, such as ants, bees, and fish, can teach us to tackle some of the most complex conundrums in business, politics, and technology.
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5 out of 5 stars
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FLOCK TO THIS BOOK!
- By serine on 04-25-16
By: Peter Miller
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Too Big To Know
- Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
- By: David Weinberger
- Narrated by: Peter Johnson
- Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 139
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 110
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Story4 out of 5 stars 109
We used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts. We'd nail down the facts and move on. But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There's more knowledge than ever, of course, but it's different. Topics have no boundaries, and nobody agrees on anything.Yet this is the greatest time in history to be a knowledge seeker - if you know how.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Good to know ...
- By John B. Fisher on 01-24-12
By: David Weinberger
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Smart Thinking
- Three Essential Keys to Solve Problems, Innovate, and Get Things Done
- By: Art Markman
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 700
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 586
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Story4 out of 5 stars 586
Think smart people are just born that way? Think again. Drawing on diverse studies of the mind, from psychology to linguistics, philosophy, and learning science, Art Markman, Ph.D., demonstrates the difference between "smart thinking" and raw intelligence, showing listeners how memory works, how to learn effectively, and how to use knowledge to get things done. He then introduces his own three-part formula for listeners to employ "smart thinking" in their daily lives.
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2 out of 5 stars
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I feel asleep in class
- By Lee on 12-14-12
By: Art Markman
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Outnumbered
- Exploring the Algorithms That Control Our Lives
- By: David Sumpter
- Narrated by: David West
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 25
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 25
Our increasing reliance on technology and the Internet has opened a window for mathematicians and data researchers to gaze through into our lives. Using the data they are constantly collecting about where we travel, where we shop, what we buy, what interests us, they can begin to predict our daily habits, and increasingly we are relinquishing our decision making to algorithms - are we giving up this up too easily?
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4 out of 5 stars
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A good reality check for "Cambridge Hyperbolitica"
- By Haggai Elkayam on 08-06-18
By: David Sumpter
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Everything All at Once
- How to Unleash Your Inner Nerd, Tap into Radical Curiosity and Solve Any Problem
- By: Bill Nye
- Narrated by: Bill Nye
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,501
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,382
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,374
Everything All at Once is an exciting, inspiring call to unleash the power of the nerd mindset that exists within us all. Nye believes we'll never be able to tackle our society's biggest, most complex problems if we don't even know how to solve the small ones. Step by step, he shows his listeners the key tools behind his everything-all-at-once approach: radical curiosity, a deep desire for a better future, and a willingness to take the actions needed to make it a reality.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Bill Nye is awesome, but skip this one
- By Evan on 08-15-17
By: Bill Nye
What listeners say about Pluses and Minuses
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- George Corser
- 01-04-23
math for poets
narrator terrific. content just, meh, too obvious for someone with stem degree. basically a book about math that does not contain any actual math. better books: men of mathematics and elements of mathematics. (not sure if those have audible versions.)
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