In this intimate, engaging book, John Demos offers an illuminating portrait of how colonial Americans, from the first settlers to the postrevolutionary generation, viewed their life experiences. He also offers an invaluable inside look into the craft of a master social historian as he unearths--in sometimes unexpected places--fragments of evidence that help us probe the interior lives of people from the faraway past. The earliest settlers lived in a traditional world of natural cycles that shaped their behavior: day and night; seasonal rhythms; the lunar cycle; the life cycle itself. Indeed, so basic were these elements that "almost no one felt a need to comment on them." Yet he finds cyclical patterns--in the seasonal foods they ate, in the spike in marriages following the autumn harvest. Witchcraft cases reveal the different emotional reactions to day versus night, as accidental mishaps in the light become fearful nighttime mysteries. During the transitional world of the American Revolution, people began to see their society in newer terms but seemed unable or unwilling to come to terms with that novelty. Americans became new, Demos points out, before they fully understood what it meant. Their cyclical frame of reference was coming unmoored, giving way to a linear world view in early nineteenth-century America that is neatly captured by Kentucky doctor Daniel Drake's description of the chronography of his life. In his meditation on these three worlds, Demos brilliantly demonstrates how large historical forces are reflected in individual lives. With the imaginative insights and personable touch that we have come to expect from this fine chronicler of the human condition, "Circles and Lines" is vintage John Demos.

Geometry: The Line and the Circle is an undergraduate text with a strong narrative that is written at the appropriate level of rigor for an upper-level survey or axiomatic course in geometry. Starting with Euclid's Elements, the book connects topics in Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry in an intentional and meaningful way, with historical context. The line and the circle are the principal characters driving the narrative. In every geometry considered—which include spherical, hyperbolic, and taxicab, as well as finite affine and projective geometries—these two objects are analyzed and highlighted. Along the way, the reader contemplates fundamental questions such as: What is a straight line? What does parallel mean? What is distance? What is area? There is a strong focus on axiomatic structures throughout the text. While Euclid is a constant inspiration and the Elements is repeatedly revisited with substantial coverage of Books I, II, III, IV, and VI, non-Euclidean geometries are introduced very early to give the reader perspective on questions of axiomatics. Rounding out the thorough coverage of axiomatics are concluding chapters on transformations and constructibility. The book is compulsively readable with great attention paid to the historical narrative and hundreds of attractive problems.

Born in Scotland over 250 years ago, William Playfair was a dreamer who ñsaw the world differently from other people.î Unfortunately, this skill didnÍt easily translate into the fame and fortune he hoped for. In fact, it often got him into trouble with family, friends and bosses. But WillÍs innovative vision did inspire a big idea that would set him apart: he turned numbers into pictures by creating line graphs, bar graphs and pie charts! Numbers as pictures? ThereÍs an idea thatÍs off the charts!

Read stories inspired by the four Underground lines that run around and through areas of London - part of a series of twelve books tied to the twelve lines of the London Underground, as Tfl celebrates 150 years of the Tube with Penguin. Family, passion and fashion come together in four tales: The Circle Line: From Lucy Wadham, the bestselling author of The Secret Life of France, an autobiographical tale of bohemians, punk, the King's Road in the 1970s and family. The Metropolitan Line: Richard Mabey, one of Britain's leading nature writers, looks in A Good Parcel of English Soil at the relationship between city and country, and how this brings out the power of nature The East London Line: London is a centre of cutting-edge fashion - here, the creators of 'the best fashion mag out there', Fantastic Man, tell the story of London style through the history of the button-down shirt. The Waterloo & City Line: Leanne Shapton, author of Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris and Swimming Studies, creates an authorly and artistic response to travel, work and being a passenger.

Find the right algorithm for your image processing applicationExploring the recent achievements that have occurred since the mid-1990s, Circular and Linear Regression: Fitting Circles and Lines by Least Squares explains how to use modern algorithms to fit geometric contours (circles and circular arcs) to observed data in image processing and comput