
Math Without Numbers
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Narrated by:
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Soneela Nankani
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By:
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Milo Beckman
About this listen
An audio tour of the structures and patterns we call "math"
This is an audiobook about math, but it contains no numbers.
Math Without Numbers is a vivid, conversational, and wholly original guide to the three main branches of abstract math - topology, analysis, and algebra - which turn out to be surprisingly easy to grasp. This audiobook upends the conventional approach to math, inviting you to think creatively about shape and dimension, the infinite and infinitesimal, symmetries, proofs, and how these concepts all fit together. What awaits listeners is a freewheeling tour of the inimitable joys and unsolved mysteries of this curiously powerful subject.
Like the classic math allegory Flatland, first published over a century ago, or Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach 40 years ago, there has never been a math book quite like Math Without Numbers. So many popularizations of math have dwelt on numbers like pi or zero or infinity. This audiobook goes well beyond to questions such as: How many shapes are there? Is anything bigger than infinity? And is math even true? Milo Beckman shows why math is mostly just pattern recognition and how it keeps on surprising us with unexpected, useful connections to the real world.
The ambitions of this audiobook take a special kind of author. An inventive, original thinker pursuing his calling with jubilant passion. A prodigy. Milo Beckman completed the graduate-level course sequence in mathematics at age 16, when he was a sophomore at Harvard; while writing this book, he was studying the philosophical foundations of physics at Columbia under Brian Greene, among others.
This audiobook includes a PDF of illustrations and additional concepts from the book.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2020 Milo Beckman (P)2020 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“With charm, unwavering enthusiasm, and a lot of cartoons, Math Without Numbers waltzes the reader through a garden of higher mathematics.” (Jordan Ellenberg, professor of mathematics, University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of How Not To Be Wrong)
“A playful paean to the pleasures of studying higher math ... Readers with an abundance of curiosity and the time to puzzle over Beckman’s many examples, riddles, and questions, will make many fascinating discoveries.” (Publishers Weekly)
“A pleasant, amusing look at mathematics as a description of everything.” (Kirkus Reviews)
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What a refreshing perspective.
- By shawn wilson on 08-26-24
By: Shalinee Sharma
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The Universe Speaks in Numbers
- How Modern Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets
- By: Graham Farmelo
- Narrated by: Hugh Kermode
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the great insights of science is that the universe has an underlying order. The supreme goal of physicists is to understand this order through laws that describe the behavior of the most basic particles and the forces between them. For centuries, we have searched for these laws by studying the results of experiments. Since the 1970s, however, experiments at the world's most powerful atom-smashers have offered few new clues. So some of the world's leading physicists have looked to a different source of insight: modern mathematics.
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Great story and narration, but lacks rigor...
- By James S. on 05-31-19
By: Graham Farmelo
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How Not to Be Wrong
- The Power of Mathematical Thinking
- By: Jordan Ellenberg
- Narrated by: Jordan Ellenberg
- Length: 13 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Ellenberg chases mathematical threads through a vast range of time and space, from the everyday to the cosmic, encountering, among other things, baseball, Reaganomics, daring lottery schemes, Voltaire, the replicability crisis in psychology, Italian Renaissance painting, artificial languages, the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the coming obesity apocalypse, Antonin Scalia's views on crime and punishment, the psychology of slime molds, what Facebook can and can't figure out about you, and the existence of God.
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Great book but better in writing
- By Michael on 07-02-14
By: Jordan Ellenberg
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Everything Is Predictable
- How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World
- By: Tom Chivers
- Narrated by: Tom Chivers
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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At its simplest, Bayes’s theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. But in Everything Is Predictable, Tom Chivers lays out how it affects every aspect of our lives. He explains why highly accurate screening tests can lead to false positives and how a failure to account for it in court has put innocent people in jail. A cornerstone of rational thought, many argue that Bayes’s theorem is a description of almost everything. But who was the man who lent his name to this theorem?
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I was looking forward to this. What a disappointment.
- By Alessandro Fadini on 06-28-24
By: Tom Chivers
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11 Effective Strategies for Teaching Math to Students Who Have Given Up on Learning
- By: Jordan Smith Jr Ed. D.
- Narrated by: Ashley Hudson
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Math has certainly gotten a bad reputation for being a subject that involves endless calculations and problems that will never be used in the real world, especially now that we all walk around with calculators in our pockets! But the fact is that math is required in multiple areas of an adult’s life, from preparing recipes to managing finances, and that’s without a career in STEM.
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Revitalize Math Learning
- By Drake on 07-14-24
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A Mind for Numbers
- How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)
- By: Barbara Oakley PhD
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 7 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In A Mind for Numbers, Dr. Oakley lets us in on the secrets to learning effectively - secrets that even dedicated and successful students wish they’d known earlier. Contrary to popular belief, math requires creative, as well as analytical, thinking. Most people think that there’s only one way to do a problem, when in actuality, there are often a number of different solutions - you just need the creativity to see them.
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Not quite what you expect
- By Sean P Ruggier on 07-20-22
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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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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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Good treatment of the subject
- By Kindle Customer on 04-09-18
By: David Stipp
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Mathematica
- A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity
- By: David Bessis, Kevin Frey - translator
- Narrated by: Mike Lenz
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Math has a reputation for being inaccessible. People think that it requires a special gift or that comprehension is a matter of genes. Yet, the greatest mathematicians throughout history, from Rene Descartes to Alexander Grothendieck, have insisted that this is not the case.
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Great General Creativity Guide (w' math as a lens)
- By V. Bandy on 07-19-24
By: David Bessis, and others
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Significant Figures
- The Lives and Work of Great Mathematicians
- By: Ian Stewart
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In Significant Figures, acclaimed mathematician Ian Stewart introduces the visionaries of mathematics throughout history. Delving into the lives of twenty-five great mathematicians, Stewart examines the roles they played in creating, inventing, and discovering the mathematics we use today. Through these short biographies, we get acquainted with the history of mathematics.
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Beware
- By Anton Kurtz on 12-08-18
By: Ian Stewart
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Measurement
- By: Paul Lockhart
- Narrated by: Kyle Tait
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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For seven years, Paul Lockhart's A Mathematician's Lament enjoyed a samizdat-style popularity in the mathematics underground, before demand prompted its 2009 publication to even wider applause and debate. An impassioned critique of K-12 mathematics education, it outlined how we shortchange students by introducing them to math the wrong way. Here, Lockhart offers the positive side of the math education story by showing us how math should be done. Measurement offers a permanent solution to math phobia by introducing us to mathematics as an artful way of thinking and living.
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Wonderfully written!
- By Emelie Reuterswärd on 02-27-20
By: Paul Lockhart
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A Tour of the Calculus
- By: David Berlinski
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Were it not for the calculus, mathematicians would have no way to describe the acceleration of a motorcycle or the effect of gravity on thrown balls and distant planets, or to prove that a man could cross a room and eventually touch the opposite wall. Just how calculus makes these things possible and in doing so finds a correspondence between real numbers and the real world is the subject of this dazzling book by a writer of extraordinary clarity and stylistic brio.
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Top Poet among Mathemeticians
- By Kindle Customer on 05-27-14
By: David Berlinski
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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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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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Not written to be read aloud
- By A Reader in Maine on 02-21-20
By: Steven Strogatz
What listeners say about Math Without Numbers
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Christopher Richport
- 10-03-24
Better than infinity, worse than the continuum.
It’s fun, although unnecessary political at times. It just spoken math, great and will help you understand it as an art. Math really isn’t “true” just a “fun” art that happens to be practical. This book touched on both the art and sci
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- Melody
- 10-16-24
Very engaging
I enjoyed the journey through the topics and challenges to the mind. This is a friendly and candid read about how maths impact our lives and thinking.
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- SmartSysta
- 06-13-23
I learned something
Pros: I learned that math is ever evolving.
Cons: It got wired when the narrator started talking to herself. I really didn’t get the point. It felt like she was talking to a child or a teenager in order to get her point across. Despite listening to the entire book, I literally tuned out and should have moved onto something else. It was not that good of a book to me.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Real Talk
- 04-23-24
A wonderful introduction to mathematics
I have read and listened to a ridiculous amount of books. What this book did better than almost any I have ever read is condense and simplify information in the clearest and most accessible way. Some books are simple at the cost of rigor, clarity or depth. This manages to check all the boxes. Truly an astonishing achievement.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-10-23
Decent
I wanted a little more depth but I understand the market has a bias towards novice or expert. Worth the time
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2 people found this helpful
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- david malaguti
- 09-23-23
please leave your politics at home
A little bit all over the place, but an interesting view into one mathematician's head.
Worth a Listen.
The "Fundamentals" chapter veered into whether mathematics is a racist, imperialist, sexist, CIS-gender endeavor..for 20 minutes...
Presented as a dialogue between two women. Reading what a (self-loathing) white dude wrote.
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18 people found this helpful
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- Aaron
- 08-27-24
Informative and fun, but very short and a touch of unnecessary politics
It was a fun listen and doesn’t take long. It’s a short book and the narrator performance is spot on. Most of the book ahead decent story to it and the attached PDF is helpful, but being mathematically inclined and familiar with much of the book offerings I didn’t need it.
What was a turn off was the little bit of using political examples to shore up a meaning when there are better examples. No need to do this when the world if divided. You will find if your politics lean one way use positive examples on both sides. Or stay away from it altogether. This will get a wider audience interested in math which we need and not needlessly turn anyone away.
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- Anonymous User
- 02-25-25
easy to understand and enjoy
I'm a math nerd, but even so, this gave a perspective that anyone can appreciate and understand. it was not overbearing. it was relatable, interesting and a fun listen.
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- Jamey Nolan
- 08-28-24
I deserve an apology
Three chapters in and we still haven't learned anything about math. I could have google searched 3 words and saved myself an hour. However, it might be a good thing to put on repeat if one has a difficult time sleeping.
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