Ebook: Mathematics, philosophy, and the "real world"

These lectures reveal how mathematics has changed the way people look at the world. We study how the model of certainty in Euclid's revolutionary Elements influenced philosophers for centuries, and how the invention of non-Euclidiean geometry further influenced philosophy and changed modern views of the world. As well. we consider how the newer disciplines of probability and statistics gave scientists ways of dealing--with precision--with events that did not seem to follow laws but were due to chance. We look at some elementary probability theory and its applications to the study of society, and we examine such issues as free will, determinism, and chance in the context of the philosophical views of thinkers from Pascal to Gould.  Read more...