JOSEPH MAZUR

What is time? This question has fascinated philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists for thousands of years. Why does time seem to speed up with age? What is its connection with memory, anticipation, and sleep cycles?

Award‑winning author and mathematician Joseph Mazur provides an engaging exploration of how the understanding of time has evolved throughout human history and offers a compelling new vision, submitting that time lives within us. Our cells, he notes, have a temporal awareness, guided by environmental cues in sync with patterns of social interaction. Readers learn that, as a consequence of time's personal nature, a forty‑eight‑hour journey on the space shuttle can feel shorter than a six‑hour trip on the Soyuz capsule, that the Amondawa of the Amazon do not have ages, and that time speeds up with fever and slows down when we feel in danger.

With a narrative punctuated by personal stories of time's effects on truck drivers, Olympic racers, prisoners, and clockmakers, Mazur's journey is filled with fascinating insights into how our technologies, our bodies, and our attitudes can change our perceptions. Ultimately, time reveals itself as something that rides on the rhythms of our minds. The Clock Mirage presents an innovative perspective that will force us to rethink our relationship with time, and how best to use it.

Delving into the mathematics of our poetic twists of fate, Mazur has written a book that will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered how all of the tiny decisions and coincidences that happen in our lives add up to what can seem like an impossibly improbable whole. A must-read for math enthusiasts and story-tellers alike, Fluke helps us to understand the true nature of chance, and thus, of life itself.

Traversing mathematical history, and the foundations of numerals in different cultures, Enlightening Symbols looks at how historians have disagreed over the origins of the numerical system for the past two centuries. It follows the transfigurations of algebra, from a rhetorical style to a symbolic one, demonstrating that most of algebra before the sixteenth century was written in prose or in verse employing the written names of numerals. The book also investigates the subconscious and psychological effects that mathematical symbols have had on mathematical thought, moods, meaning, communication, and comprehension. It considers how these symbols influence us (through similarity, association, identity, resemblance, and repeated imagery), how they lead to new ideas by subconscious associations, how they make connections between experience and the unknown, and how they contribute to the communication of basic mathematics.
From words to abbreviations to symbols, this book examines how math evolved to the familiar forms we use today.

What's Luck Got to Do With It? The History, Mathematics, and Psychology behind the Illusion of Luck in Gambling (232 pages, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-13890-9) Now available.
Centering on the general mathematics of gambling, primarily on probability and statistics through a simple tutorial on what probability and statistics are about, this book moves on to explain expected value, the law of large numbers, coincidences, distribution functions and the mathematics of decision making. And that will give a partial idea—the mathematical piece—of what luck in gambling really is. Internet gambling, along with the usual Internet risks, is now popular, along with reality TV shows such as Deal or No Deal, which counts on both the psychological makeup of the contestants as well as on how little those contestants know about the mathematics of decision-making. Greed and compulsivity are behind the essential entertainment factors of those shows. The psychology of the audiences and contestants is investigated along with the contestant’s mixed problems of greed and stardom craving. Some compound combination of greed, ignorance of expected value and moment-of-fame glory takes over. And this will supply the psychological answer to the question of what luck really is.
Ultimately, we begin to understand greed and luck in gambling as well as why people accept bets with negative expectation and finally answer the central question of the book from both mathematical and psychological positions—what makes us feel lucky in gambling?

Listed by the The Library Journal as one of the best Sci-Tech books of 2006, the Motion Paradox begins with how Zeno and the Ancient Greeks understood motion, moves to Renaissance thinkers such as Galileo and then discusses the unparalled contributions of Isaac Newton. Nineteenth century ideas are then explored before moving on to the two revolutions of the twentieth century--relativity and quantum mechanics.

Euclid in the Rainforest (one of two Finalists of the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction and chosen as one of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles of the Year 2005, and chosen by the Guardian as one of the ten best ever books in the category of popular math) examines the three types of logic: the classical logic of the Ancient Greeks, the bewildering logic of infinity, and the everyday logic of plausible reasoning that guides all science today.

From the rudimentary mathematical abilities of prehistoric man to the counterintuitive and bizarre ideas at the edges of modern math, this masterpiece of science writing tells the story of mathematics through the history of its most central concept: number.