Simple and effective techniques for quickly estimating virtually anything Guesstimation 2.0 reveals the simple and effective techniques needed to estimate virtually anything—quickly—and illustrates them using an eclectic array of problems. A stimulating follow-up to Guesstimation, this is the must-have book for anyone preparing for a job interview in technology or finance, where more and more leading businesses test applicants using estimation questions just like these. The ability to guesstimate on your feet is an essential skill to have in today's world, whether you're trying to distinguish between a billion-dollar subsidy and a trillion-dollar stimulus, a megawatt wind turbine and a gigawatt nuclear plant, or parts-per-million and parts-per-billion contaminants. Lawrence Weinstein begins with a concise tutorial on how to solve these kinds of order of magnitude problems, and then invites readers to have a go themselves. The book features dozens of problems along with helpful hints and easy-to-understand solutions. It also includes appendixes containing useful formulas and more. Guesstimation 2.0 shows how to estimate everything from how closely you can orbit a neutron star without being pulled apart by gravity, to the fuel used to transport your food from the farm to the store, to the total length of all toilet paper used in the United States. It also enables readers to answer, once and for all, the most asked environmental question of our day: paper or plastic?

Guesstimation is a book that unlocks the power of approximation--it's popular mathematics rounded to the nearest power of ten! The ability to estimate is an important skill in daily life. More and more leading businesses today use estimation questions in interviews to test applicants' abilities to think on their feet. Guesstimation enables anyone with basic math and science skills to estimate virtually anything--quickly--using plausible assumptions and elementary arithmetic. Lawrence Weinstein and John Adam present an eclectic array of estimation problems that range from devilishly simple to quite sophisticated and from serious real-world concerns to downright silly ones. How long would it take a running faucet to fill the inverted dome of the Capitol? What is the total length of all the pickles consumed in the US in one year? What are the relative merits of internal-combustion and electric cars, of coal and nuclear energy? The problems are marvelously diverse, yet the skills to solve them are the same. The authors show how easy it is to derive useful ballpark estimates by breaking complex problems into simpler, more manageable ones--and how there can be many paths to the right answer. The book is written in a question-and-answer format with lots of hints along the way. It includes a handy appendix summarizing the few formulas and basic science concepts needed, and its small size and French-fold design make it conveniently portable. Illustrated with humorous pen-and-ink sketches, Guesstimation will delight popular-math enthusiasts and is ideal for the classroom.

This revised and updated third edition offers a range of strategies, activities and ideas to bring mathematics to life in the primary classroom. Taking an innovative and playful approach to maths teaching, this book promotes creativity as a key element of practice and offers ideas to help your students develop knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of the subject. In the creative classroom, mathematics becomes a tool to build confidence, develop problem solving skills and motivate children. The fresh approaches explored in this book include a range of activities such as storytelling, music and construction, elevating maths learning beyond subject knowledge itself to enable students to see mathematics in a new way. Key chapters of this book explore: • Learning maths outdoors - make more noise, make more mess or work on a larger scale • Everyday maths - making sense of the numbers, patterns, shapes and measures children see around them • Music and maths – the role of rhythm in learning, and music and pattern in maths Stimulating, accessible and underpinned by the latest research and theory, this is essential reading for trainee and practising teachers who wish to embed creative approaches to maths teaching in their classroom.

These simple math secrets and tricks will forever change how you look at the world of numbers. Secrets of Mental Math will have you thinking like a math genius in no time. Get ready to amaze your friends—and yourself—with incredible calculations you never thought you could master, as renowned “mathemagician” Arthur Benjamin shares his techniques for lightning-quick calculations and amazing number tricks. This book will teach you to do math in your head faster than you ever thought possible, dramatically improve your memory for numbers, and—maybe for the first time—make mathematics fun. Yes, even you can learn to do seemingly complex equations in your head; all you need to learn are a few tricks. You’ll be able to quickly multiply and divide triple digits, compute with fractions, and determine squares, cubes, and roots without blinking an eye. No matter what your age or current math ability, Secrets of Mental Math will allow you to perform fantastic feats of the mind effortlessly. This is the math they never taught you in school.

Become a confident leader and use data, experience, and intuition to drive your decisions Agile decision making is imperative as you lead in a data-driven world. Amid streams of data and countless meetings, we make hasty decisions, slow decisions, and often no decisions. Uniquely bridging theory and practice, Decisions Over Decimals breaks this pattern by uniting data intelligence with human judgment to get to action — a sharp approach the authors refer to as Quantitative Intuition (QI). QI raises the power of thinking beyond big data without neglecting it and chasing the perfect decision while appreciating that such a thing can never really exist. Successful decision-makers are fierce interrogators. They square critical thinking with open-mindedness by blending information, intuition, and experience. Balancing these elements is at the heart of Decisions Over Decimals. This book is not only designed to be read - but frequently referenced - as you face innumerable decision moments. It is the hands-on manual for confident, accurate decision-making you've been looking for; the rare resource that provides a set of pragmatic leadership tools to accelerate: Effectively framing the problem for stakeholders Synthesizing intelligence from incomplete information Delivering decisions that stick Strike the right balance between information and intuition and lead the smarter way with the real-world guidance found in Decisions Over Decimals.

An antidote to mathematical rigor mortis, teaching how to guess answers without needing a proof or an exact calculation. In problem solving, as in street fighting, rules are for fools: do whatever works—don't just stand there! Yet we often fear an unjustified leap even though it may land us on a correct result. Traditional mathematics teaching is largely about solving exactly stated problems exactly, yet life often hands us partly defined problems needing only moderately accurate solutions. This engaging book is an antidote to the rigor mortis brought on by too much mathematical rigor, teaching us how to guess answers without needing a proof or an exact calculation. In Street-Fighting Mathematics, Sanjoy Mahajan builds, sharpens, and demonstrates tools for educated guessing and down-and-dirty, opportunistic problem solving across diverse fields of knowledge—from mathematics to management. Mahajan describes six tools: dimensional analysis, easy cases, lumping, picture proofs, successive approximation, and reasoning by analogy. Illustrating each tool with numerous examples, he carefully separates the tool—the general principle—from the particular application so that the reader can most easily grasp the tool itself to use on problems of particular interest. Street-Fighting Mathematics grew out of a short course taught by the author at MIT for students ranging from first-year undergraduates to graduate students ready for careers in physics, mathematics, management, electrical engineering, computer science, and biology. They benefited from an approach that avoided rigor and taught them how to use mathematics to solve real problems. Street-Fighting Mathematics will appear in print and online under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Share Alike license.

Meet Dolores Price. She's thirteen, wise-mouthed but wounded. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the chocolate, crisps and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she's determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly up. In his extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch an incredible ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. At once a fragile girl and a hard-edged cynic, so tough to love yet so inimitably loveable, Dolores is as poignantly real as our own imperfections.

Essential Maths for Geoscientists: An Introduction is an accessible, student-friendly introduction to the mathematics required by those students taking degree courses within the geosciences. Clearly structured throughout, this book carefully guides students step by step through the first mathematics they will encounter and provides numerous applied examples throughout to enhance students’ understanding and to place each technique in context. Opening with a chapter explaining the need for studying mathematics within geosciences, this book then moves on to cover algebra, solving equations, logarithms and exponentials, uncertainties, errors and statistics, trigonometry, vectors and basic calculus. The final chapter helps to bring the subject all together and provides detailed applied questions to test students’ knowledge. Worked applied examples are included in each chapter along with applied problem questions which are a mix of straightforward maths questions, word questions and more involved questions that involve the manipulation and interpretation of real and synthetic data. The emphasis in the book is on the application of relatively rudimentary mathematics to real-life scientific problems within the geosciences, enabling students to make use of current-day research problems and real datasets.

Extensively updated for the second edition, this handy guide covers the safety engineering of ship-shaped offshore installations at every stage of design, construction, operation, lifetime healthcare and decommissioning. New sections cover additional types of offshore structures, including offshore power plants, as well as cutting-edge technologies and all the latest advances in the field. The text focuses on minimising accidents and the effects of extreme conditions, with new chapters covering earthquakes, hurricanes and terrorist attacks, as well as traditional types of accidental events such as hull girder collapse, collisions, fires and explosions. This is an invaluable resource for students who will be approaching the subject for the first time as well as practising engineers and researchers.

Third printing. First paperback printing. Original copyright date: 2013.