Sometimes being first isn’t what you expected. Seventeen-year-old ballerina Emilia Moretti is tired of always being second best. And she’s going to prove the world she deserves to be first. In her upcoming School of the Performing Arts showcase. In the eyes of her birth parents. And in the heart of the guy she loves. She spends hours rehearsing, hours dreaming about becoming number one, hours imagining how her entire life is about to change. But when nothing goes the way she planned, she’ll need to realize what it really means to be first. Eighteen-year-old Nick Grawski doesn’t want to follow Daddy Dearest’s rules any longer. He's going to prove he's meant to be a dancer—not a lawyer—and he is not going to stay away from Em just because his father demands it. He needs to show Em that—this time around—he’s there to stay and that he won’t break her heart again. Even when her world goes down to shit, even when he finds out his dad may have been trying to protect him all along, even if being there for one another is harder than falling in love. ALWAYS SECOND BEST is a novel of hope and heartbreak and broken dreams. It’s a YA romance novel about falling in love and discovering that being first isn’t always what matters.

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

Number theory is one of the few areas of mathematics where problems of substantial interest can be fully described to someone with minimal mathematical background. Solving such problems sometimes requires difficult and deep methods. But this is not a universal phenomenon; many engaging problems can be successfully attacked with little more than one's mathematical bare hands. In this case one says that the problem can be solved in an elementary way. Such elementary methods and the problems to which they apply are the subject of this book. Not Always Buried Deep is designed to be read and enjoyed by those who wish to explore elementary methods in modern number theory. The heart of the book is a thorough introduction to elementary prime number theory, including Dirichlet's theorem on primes in arithmetic progressions, the Brun sieve, and the Erdos-Selberg proof of the prime number theorem. Rather than trying to present a comprehensive treatise, Pollack focuses on topics that are particularly attractive and accessible. Other topics covered include Gauss's theory of cyclotomy and its applications to rational reciprocity laws, Hilbert's solution to Waring's problem, and modern work on perfect numbers. The nature of the material means that little is required in terms of prerequisites: The reader is expected to have prior familiarity with number theory at the level of an undergraduate course and a first course in modern algebra (covering groups, rings, and fields). The exposition is complemented by over 200 exercises and 400 references.

Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.

The #1 New York Times bestseller. Over 20 million copies sold! Translated into 60+ languages! Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving--every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights. Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field. Learn how to: make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy); overcome a lack of motivation and willpower; design your environment to make success easier; get back on track when you fall off course; ...and much more. Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.

Business Strategy Essentials You Always Wanted To Know prepares new managers and leaders with the building blocks of business strategy. You will learn how to define strategy, different levels of strategy for the business versus departments, and how to plan tactics to implement those strategies. You are given tools to assist you with some of the more challenging aspects of strategy such as environmental scanning, SWOT analysis, and strategy analysis. After you have learned how to execute some of these strategies, you will learn what organization structures fit best with specific strategies. These timeless elements of strategy will provide you the fundamentals with a 21st century point of view. Business Strategy Essentials is part of the Management Essentials series that helps working professionals moving into management roles. The series addresses every aspect of business from HR to finance, marketing, and operations. Each book includes fundamentals, important concepts, and well-known principles, as well as practical applications of the subject matter.

These are stories about overcoming the bullying in an adolescent and teenager's life with the positive path to success. As many adolescents and teenagers face the everyday challenges of the school life, there are some who face an even more difficult challenge of being bullied every day they attend school. These stories are from young adults and adults who lived through their adolescent and teenage years of being bullied, but instead of contemplating suicide they embarked on the journey of making a difference in their own lives.

“A beautifully written and well-researched cultural criticism as well as an honest memoir” (Los Angeles Review of Books) from the author of the popular New York Times essay, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” explores the romantic myths we create and explains how they limit our ability to achieve and sustain intimacy. What really makes love last? Does love ever work the way we say it does in movies and books and Facebook posts? Or does obsessing over those love stories hurt our real-life relationships? When her parents divorced after a twenty-eight year marriage and her own ten-year relationship ended, those were the questions that Mandy Len Catron wanted to answer. In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world, “Catron melds science and emotion beautifully into a thoughtful and thought-provoking meditation” (Bookpage). She delves back to 1944, when her grandparents met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver. She uses biologists’ research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from. And she tells the story of how she decided to test an experiment that she’d read about—where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions—and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship. “Perfect fodder for the romantic and the cynic in all of us” (Booklist), How to Fall in Love with Anyone flips the script on love. “Clear-eyed and full of heart, it is mandatory reading for anyone coping with—or curious about—the challenges of contemporary courtship” (The Toronto Star).