How does homebanking work? How are board games developed? How reliable can wind energy get? How do we discover forged paintings? Do smart girls stay single? How dangerous can a bioterrorist get? In all these questions (and many others), mathematics plays a crucial role in the search for an answer.​ This book tells the story behind twenty of these questions. This is explicitly not a mathematics book, but a book about the crucial role that mathematics plays in devising the creative solutions the world needs. The questions are divided into three categories: home, garden and kitchen mathematics; mathematics for the workplace; and mathematics for tomorrow's society. The themes illustrate not only the incredibly broad applicability of mathematics in the world around us, but also the great diversity of useful mathematical techniques.

Taking the reader on a wondrous journey through the invisible universe that surrounds us--a universe made visible by mathematics--Devlin shows us what keeps a jumbo jet in the air, explains how we can see and hear a football game on TV, and allows us to predict the weather, the behavior of the stock market, and the outcome of elections. Microwave ovens, telephone cables, children's toys, pacemakers, automobiles, and computers--all operate on mathematical principles. Far from a dry and esoteric subject, mathematics is a rich and living part of our culture.

An accessible book that examines the mathematics of weather prediction Invisible in the Storm is the first book to recount the history, personalities, and ideas behind one of the greatest scientific successes of modern times—the use of mathematics in weather prediction. Although humans have tried to forecast weather for millennia, mathematical principles were used in meteorology only after the turn of the twentieth century. From the first proposal for using mathematics to predict weather, to the supercomputers that now process meteorological information gathered from satellites and weather stations, Ian Roulstone and John Norbury narrate the groundbreaking evolution of modern forecasting. The authors begin with Vilhelm Bjerknes, a Norwegian physicist and meteorologist who in 1904 came up with a method now known as numerical weather prediction. Although his proposed calculations could not be implemented without computers, his early attempts, along with those of Lewis Fry Richardson, marked a turning point in atmospheric science. Roulstone and Norbury describe the discovery of chaos theory's butterfly effect, in which tiny variations in initial conditions produce large variations in the long-term behavior of a system—dashing the hopes of perfect predictability for weather patterns. They explore how weather forecasters today formulate their ideas through state-of-the-art mathematics, taking into account limitations to predictability. Millions of variables—known, unknown, and approximate—as well as billions of calculations, are involved in every forecast, producing informative and fascinating modern computer simulations of the Earth system. Accessible and timely, Invisible in the Storm explains the crucial role of mathematics in understanding the ever-changing weather. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

"A former Wall Street quantitative analyst sounds an alarm on mathematical modeling, a pervasive new force in society that threatens to undermine democracy and widen inequality,"--NoveList.