Books like Life by the numbers by Keith J. Devlin

Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" explains how two distinct mental systems shape our judgments and decisions, offering insights into the biases that influence everyday choices.

John Allen Paulos examines mathematical illiteracy—innumeracy—as the modern equivalent of being unable to read, showing how even educated people often lack basic number sense.

The fascinating story of a problem that perplexed mathematicians for nearly 400 years In 1611, Johannes Kepler proposed that the best way to pack spheres as densely as possible was to pile them up in the same way that grocers stack oranges or tomatoes. This proposition, known as Kepler's Conjecture, seemed obvious to everyone except mathematicians, who seldom take anyone's word for anything. In the tradition of Fermat's Enigma, George Szpiro shows how the problem engaged and stymied many men of genius over the centuries--Sir Walter Raleigh, astronomer Tycho Brahe, Sir Isaac Newton, mathematicians C. F. Gauss and David Hilbert, and R. Buckminster Fuller, to name a few--until Thomas Hales of the University of Michigan submitted what seems to be a definitive proof in 1998. George G. Szpiro (Jerusalem, Israel) is a mathematician turned journalist. He is currently the Israel correspondent for the Swiss daily Neue Zurcher Zeitung.

Eastaway invites readers to discover how simple arithmetic patterns and geometry reveal hidden order in everyday life, from the way buses queue to the timing of showers, making mathematics both accessible and surprising.

From NPR's Math Guy, the story of Leonardo of Pisa, the medieval mathematician who introduced Arabic numbers to the West and helped launch the modern era. In 1202, a young Italian published one of the most influential books of all time, introducing modern arithmetic to Western Europe. Leonardo of Pisa (better known today as Fibonacci) had learned the Hindu-Arabic number system when as a teenager he traveled with his father, a customs official for Pisa, to North Africa, then one of the principal mercantile centers of Europe. Devised in India in the seventh and eighth centuries and brought to North Africa by Muslim traders, the Hindu-Arabic system (featuring the numerals 0 through 9) offered a much simpler method of calculation than the then-popular finger reckoning and cumbersome Roman numerals. Though written in scholarly Latin, Fibonacci's book Liber Abbaci (The Book of Calculation) was the first to recognize the power of the 10 numerals, and to aim them at the world of commerce. It spawned generations of popular math texts in colloquial Italian and other languages that made it possible for ordinary people to buy and sell goods, convert currencies, and keep accurate records more readily than ever before—helping transform the West into the dominant force in science, technology, and large-scale international commerce. Liber Abbaci and Fibonacci's other books made him the greatest mathematician of the Middle Ages. Yet despite the ubiquity of his discoveries, Leonardo of Pisa has largely slipped from the pages of history. He is best known today for discovering the "Fibonacci sequence" of numbers that appears with great regularity in biological structures throughout nature, and is used by some to predict the rise and fall of financial markets. Keith Devlin re-creates the life and enduring legacy of an overlooked genius, and in the process makes clear how central numbers and mathematics are to our daily lives. - Publisher.

To most people, mathematics means working with numbers. But as Keith Devlin shows in *Mathematics: The Science of Patterns*, this definition has been out of date for nearly 2,500 years. Mathematicians now see their work as the study of patterns: real or imagined, visual or mental, arising from the natural world or from within the human mind. Using this basic definition as his central theme, Devlin explores the patterns of counting, measuring, reasoning, motion, shape, position, and prediction, revealing the powerful influence mathematics has over our perception of reality. Interweaving historical highlights and current developments, and using a minimum of formulas, Devlin celebrates the precision, purity, and elegance of mathematics.

Explore mathematics through a thrilling collection of puzzles and problems presented within the metaphorical framework of a maze, making complex concepts accessible and engaging.