Six Maths Essentials

In Six Maths Essentials, the renowned mathematician Terence Tao shows how mathematics has evolved from counting and geometry into a flexible set of tools for understanding an increasingly complex world. He moves effortlessly from children discovering infinity through play, to the numbers that underpin our online lives; from Johannes Kepler using algebra to price a barrel of wine, to curved geometries that explain why GPS works and planes don't fly in straight lines on a map. Along the way, dice games, insurance policies and financial crises illuminate probability's promise--and its limits--while deceptively simple rules give rise to chaos, pattern and life itself.

Six Maths Essentials, Tao's first popular math book, provides a glimpse into the workings of his incomparable mind and how he thinks about the creativity and interconnectedness of the mathematical enterprise. Contrary to popular perception, math, he insists, isn't magic--it's a powerful way of thinking from first principles and modelling the world that anyone can learn.