

Street-Fighting Mathematics is published under CC [pdf] - realitygrill
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/full_pdfs/Street-Fighting_Mathematics.pdf
People seemed pretty interested in this book being published. I recently discovered that it's under a Creative Commons license, so enjoy!<p>Sanjoy also has previous course material floating around (eg. Order of Magnitude Physics) and if anybody has links to those or comments I'm sure people would appreciate that.
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Lewisham
I think the book is interesting, but I'm slightly disappointed it really
wasn't about street-fighting.

I think a lot about mathematics education is a domain issue. Problems are too
easily wrapped up in tedious domains that don't engage the imagination. For
one of my nationally-assessed Maths projects at school, the teacher had us
analyzing football (soccer) scores, looking at standard deviations and the
like. The class was far more engaged with the math than I'd ever seen them.

All boys dream of being a bad-ass, so I'm sure mathematics in the domain of
street-fighting would also work! ("A perp is able to accelerate his fist at 10
m/s, and his fist has a weight of about 0.5kg. A broken jaw requires 4N of
force. How much force will he put in your face? Will he break your jaw?")

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jimmyjim
Can anyone comment on what would be the 'prereq' for this? Are the video
lectures available anywhere (he seems to have taught a class by same name
before)? And, approximately how much time would it take for someone going over
it as self-study? I know the answer to the last question probably depends, but
hopefully a ball mark estimate can be given

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acangiano
It looks like an understanding of Calculus and basic Physics is all that is
required to read this book. Ballkpark estimate (how ironic, having to do a
ballpark estimation before having read a book on how to do ballpark
estimates): between 10 and 30 hours.

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GFischer
When do you people in the US start to learn about integrals?

Is it expected that a first-year undergraduate student already has the
knowledge to understand the book?

I don't have the required "prerequisites" as the GP puts it to understand the
book, but I should :( and it might shame me into studying a bit :) (then
again, I probably won't)

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golwengaud
(Single) integrals are freshman calculus, which is nominally taught in the
first year of university. In reality, my experience is that many students
(and, I would guess most science/engineering/math majors) take AP calculus
during their last year of high school (17-18 years old), and proceed to
differential equations, multivariable calculus, or whatever is next in their
major's sequence during the first year of university.

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GFischer
Thanks for the answers. For all the flak US education receives, the option of
taking AP classes sounds good (and it gives college credits, which is even
better!).

From your post I could find
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Placement_Calculus> which shows that AP
Calculus does indeed include integrals.

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jgg
_Thanks for the answers. For all the flak US education receives, the option of
taking AP classes sounds good (and it gives college credits, which is even
better!)._

This is utterly derailing the main topic of conversation, but...

I know that a lot of mathematicians dislike AP Calculus. The original thinking
was that Calculus couldn't be taught to highschoolers, so you waited until
University to take it. Aspiring mathematicians would take a rigorous, proof-
based Caclulus course, which would prepare them to tackle harder subjects in
the future. Everyone else (engineers, chemists, physicists, etc.) would take a
more general/applied course. Now, all but a handful of universities offer such
courses, under the assumption that anyone who wants to be a mathematician has
_surely_ taken AP Caclulus. So the idea of proof-based Calc. for future
mathematicians has been lost in transition, and the end result is that you
have kids hitting Multivariate Calculus and Differential Equations who haven't
seen a proof in their lives.

The current AP Calculus courses are 99% computation. I was challenged while
working through Spviak's book with no teacher guidance in highschool, but I
scored a perfect 5 on the AP test with little effort.

~~~
mturmon
In short, the lack of a proof-based class renders students Calc-clueless.
(groan)

This happened to me. I went straight from high school calc into college
differential equations because the AP score allowed me. It took a Rudin-based
analysis course, much later, for me to appreciate proofs of convergence or
epsilon-delta arguments, because my H.S. calc did not have them, and the
college diff-eq assumed you knew them already. The shock was painful.

Eventually though, you learn what you need to know.

~~~
jgg
_It took a Rudin-based analysis course, much later, for me to appreciate
proofs of convergence or epsilon-delta arguments, because my H.S. calc did not
have them, and the college diff-eq assumed you knew them already. The shock
was painful._

I have yet to take a course that uses the so-called "terse little blue book
from hell". (:

 _Eventually though, you learn what you need to know._

Indeed, although I wonder about people becoming discouraged about being
mathematicians simply because they've been misled for so long about what's on
the "other side" of college math.

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yannis
A highly recommended read.

Not to spoil anyone's fun but gems like this abound:

A valid economic argument cannot reach a conclusion that depends on the
astronomical phenomenon chosen to measure time.( _Discussing GDP and
Multinationals in Nigeria_ ).

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noelwelsh
Looks great! Now can someone get me more hours in the day?

~~~
acangiano
Unless you are a very unique case, you'll should be able squeeze a book this
size into your daily life. Let's assume that given the content and the font-
size, an average HN reader would require an hour to read 10 pages (that's
underestimating most people's reading speed of course). Then the book would
require, on average, about 12 hours to read. If you dedicate 2 hours a day to
it, you'll have finished it before the week is over. If you take the time to
solve all the problems presented, it may take you a few more weeks, but it's
not a major project like reading and doing all the exercises from SICP.

~~~
noelwelsh
This issue isn't so much the time to read the book as the time to read all the
books I want to read. I already have two texts underway ("Concepts of
Nonparametric Theory" and "Prediction Learning and Games").

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carterschonwald
I'm very excited :) The book is a combination of developments from the
author's phd thesis and a likewise named course that has been run the past few
years at MIT's iap term, and is chock full of great tricks and habits to do
sophisticated calculations mentally (or at least with greater simplicity)!

~~~
realitygrill
Do you have links to those? I know of the MIT ones, but I've also seen links
to his Order of Magnitude Physics materials (at Caltech) floating around
before.

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sandGorgon
Anyone have a epub version for the iphone/android ?

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zitterbewegung
Since its a small pdf it looks great on my kindle. I believe I read an earlier
draft of this and I was impressed.

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shirtless_coder
I would much rather have this book in dead tree form. It seems like it would
be great to sit on the couch with.

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Rod
Why link to the PDF? Why not link to the book's page?

[http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&...](http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12156)

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realitygrill
I thought it might be a bit hard to notice the pdf link - I'd visited several
times but only noticed the CC license because of an Amazon review.

