View your shopping cart.

Banner Message

SEARCH OUR INVENTORY OF THOUSANDS OF NEW & USED BOOKS
ALL USED BOOKS IN VERY GOOD TO EXCELLENT CONDITION -- MANY LIKE NEW!

Science

A Beautiful Mind (USED)

A Beautiful Mind (USED)

$9.99
More Info
The author of the groundbreaking bestseller A Beautiful Mind takes the reader on a journey of discovery--how the greatest invention of modern times, economics, has changed the lives of every single human being.

In a sweeping narrative, the author of the megabestseller A Beautiful Mind takes us on a journey through modern history with the men and women who changed the lives of every single person on the planet. It's the epic story of the making of modern economics, and of how economics rescued mankind from squalor and deprivation by placing its material fate in its own hands rather than in Fate.

Nasar's account begins with Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew observing and publishing the condition of the poor majority in mid-nineteenth-century London, the richest and most glittering place in the world. This was a new pursuit. She describes the often heroic efforts of Marx, Engels, Alfred Marshall, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and the American Irving Fisher to put those insights into action--with revolutionary consequences for the world.

From the great John Maynard Keynes to Schumpeter, Hayek, Keynes's disciple Joan Robinson, the influential American economists Paul Samuelson and Milton Freedman, and India's Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, she shows how the insights of these activist thinkers transformed the world--from one city, London, to the developed nations in Europe and America, and now to the entire planet. In Nasar's dramatic narrative of these discoverers we witness men and women responding to personal crises, world wars, revolutions, economic upheavals, and each other's ideas to turn back Malthus and transform the dismal science into a triumph over mankind's hitherto age-old destiny of misery and early death. This idea, unimaginable less than 200 years ago, is a story of trial and error, but ultimately transcendent, as it is rendered here in a stunning and moving narrative.

A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the cosmos (USED)

A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the cosmos (USED)

$6.99
More Info

By 1514, the reclusive cleric Nicolaus Copernicus had written and hand-copied an initial outline of his heliocentric theory-in which he defied common sense and received wisdom to place the sun, not the earth, at the center of our universe, and set the earth spinning among the other planets. Over the next two decades, Copernicus expanded his theory through hundreds of observations, while compiling in secret a book-length manuscript that tantalized mathematicians and scientists throughout Europe. For fear of ridicule, he refused to publish.

In 1539, a young German mathematician, Georg Joachim Rheticus, drawn by rumors of a revolution to rival the religious upheaval of Martin Luther's Reformation, traveled to Poland to seek out Copernicus. Two years later, the Protestant youth took leave of his aging Catholic mentor and arranged to have Copernicus's manuscript published, in 1543, as De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres)-the book that forever changed humankind's place in the universe.

In her elegant, compelling style, Dava Sobel chronicles, as nobody has, the conflicting personalities and extraordinary discoveries that shaped the Copernican Revolution. At the heart of the book is her play And the Sun Stood Still, imagining Rheticus's struggle to convince Copernicus to let his manuscript see the light of day. As she achieved with her bestsellers Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, Sobel expands the bounds of narration, giving us an unforgettable portrait of scientific achievement, and of the ever-present tensions between science and faith.

ABC's of Boolean Algebra (USED)

$10.00
More Info

ACTORS: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems (The Mit Press Series in Artificial Intelligence) (USED)

$12.00
More Info
The transition from sequential to parallel computation is an area of critical concern in today's computer technology, particularly in architecture, programming languages, systems, and artificial intelligence. This book addresses central issues in concurrency, and by producing both a syntactic definition and a denotational model of Hewitt's actor paradigm--a model of computation specifically aimed at constructing and analyzing distributed large-scale parallel systems--it substantially advances the understanding of parallel computation.Contents: Introduction. General Design Decisions. Computation in ACTOR Systems. A More Expressive Language. A Model for ACTOR Systems. Concurrency Issues. Abstraction and Compositionality. Conclusions.
Adding It Up: Helping Children Learn Mathematics (USED)

Adding It Up: Helping Children Learn Mathematics (USED)

$12.00
More Info

Adding It Up explores how students in pre-K through 8th grade learn mathematics and recommends how teaching, curricula, and teacher education should change to improve mathematics learning during these critical years.

The committee identifies five interdependent components of mathematical proficiency and describes how students develop this proficiency. With examples and illustrations, the book presents a portrait of mathematics learning:

  • Research findings on what children know about numbers by the time they arrive in pre-K and the implications for mathematics instruction.
  • Details on the processes by which students acquire mathematical proficiency with whole numbers, rational numbers, and integers, as well as beginning algebra, geometry, measurement, and probability and statistics.
  • The committee discusses what is known from research about teaching for mathematics proficiency, focusing on the interactions between teachers and students around educational materials and how teachers develop proficiency in teaching mathematics.

    Adult Mortality in Developed Countries (USED)

    $7.99
    More Info
    With sharp declines in infant and child mortality during the twentieth century, virtually all deaths in developed countries now occur among adults. This volume looks at the causes of adult mortality, focusing particularly on socioeconomic factors. It goes beyond description of the observed differences in the level of mortality within and among countries towards explaining these differences. Scholars of demography, sociology, and public health will discover that this study raises important policy implications for the governments of developed countries.
    Algebraic Structure of Group Rings (Dover Books on Mathematics) (USED)

    Algebraic Structure of Group Rings (Dover Books on Mathematics) (USED)

    $75.00
    More Info
    Highly recommended by the Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society, this comprehensive, self-contained treatment of group rings was written by an authority on the subject. Suitable for graduate students, it was hailed by the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society as a majestic account... encyclopedic and lucid.
    The three-part survey begins with an introduction that defines the trace map, considers the augmentation ideal in considerable detail, and provides all the necessary group ring results for later characterizations of dimension subgroups. A second section on linear identities characterizes prime and semiprime group rings, brings semisimplicity considerations into play, and offers construction techniques for obtaining primitive group rings. The final part, an exploration of finiteness properties, consists chiefly of a study of Noetherian group rings. Hundreds of exercises of varying difficulty appear throughout the text.
    American Catch: The Fight For Our Local Seafood (USED)

    American Catch: The Fight For Our Local Seafood (USED)

    $4.99
    More Info
    INVESTIGATIVE REPORTERS & EDITORS Book Award, Finalist 2014

    A fascinating discussion of a multifaceted issue and a passionate call to action --Kirkus

    From the acclaimed author of Four Fish and The Omega Principle, Paul Greenberg uncovers the tragic unraveling of the nation's seafood supply--telling the surprising story of why Americans stopped eating from their own waters in American Catch

    In 2005, the United States imported five billion pounds of seafood, nearly double what we imported twenty years earlier. Bizarrely, during that same period, our seafood exports quadrupled. American Catch examines New York oysters, Gulf shrimp, and Alaskan salmon to reveal how it came to be that 91 percent of the seafood Americans eat is foreign.

    In the 1920s, the average New Yorker ate six hundred local oysters a year. Today, the only edible oysters lie outside city limits. Following the trail of environmental desecration, Greenberg comes to view the New York City oyster as a reminder of what is lost when local waters are not valued as a food source.

    Farther south, a different catastrophe threatens another seafood-rich environment. When Greenberg visits the Gulf of Mexico, he arrives expecting to learn of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill's lingering effects on shrimpers, but instead finds that the more immediate threat to business comes from overseas. Asian-farmed shrimp--cheap, abundant, and a perfect vehicle for the frying and sauces Americans love--have flooded the American market.

    Finally, Greenberg visits Bristol Bay, Alaska, home to the biggest wild sockeye salmon run left in the world. A pristine, productive fishery, Bristol Bay is now at great risk: The proposed Pebble Mine project could under¬mine the very spawning grounds that make this great run possible. In his search to discover why this pre¬cious renewable resource isn't better protected, Green¬berg encounters a shocking truth: the great majority of Alaskan salmon is sent out of the country, much of it to Asia. Sockeye salmon is one of the most nutritionally dense animal proteins on the planet, yet Americans are shipping it abroad.

    Despite the challenges, hope abounds. In New York, Greenberg connects an oyster restoration project with a vision for how the bivalves might save the city from rising tides. In the Gulf, shrimpers band together to offer local catch direct to consumers. And in Bristol Bay, fishermen, environmentalists, and local Alaskans gather to roadblock Pebble Mine. With American Catch, Paul Greenberg proposes a way to break the current destructive patterns of consumption and return American catch back to American eaters.

    An Alchemy of the Brain (USED)

    An Alchemy of the Brain (USED)

    $3.99
    More Info
    From the New York Times bestselling author of The Zookeeper's Wife, an ambitious and enlightening work that combines an artist's eye with a scientist's erudition to illuminate, as never before, the magic and mysteries of the human mind. Long treasured by literary readers for her uncommon ability to bridge the gap between art and science, celebrated scholar-artist Diane Ackerman returns with the book she was born to write. Her dazzling new work, An Alchemy of Mind, offers an unprecedented exploration and celebration of the mental fantasia in which we spend our days--and does for the human mind what the bestselling A Natural History of the Senses did for the physical senses. Bringing a valuable female perspective to the topic, Diane Ackerman discusses the science of the brain as only she can: with gorgeous, immediate language and imagery that paint an unusually lucid and vibrant picture for the reader. And in addition to explaining memory, thought, emotion, dreams, and language acquisition, she reports on the latest discoveries in neuroscience and addresses controversial subjects like the effects of trauma and male versus female brains. In prose that is not simply accessible but also beautiful and electric, Ackerman distills the hard, objective truths of science in order to yield vivid, heavily anecdotal explanations about a range of existential questions regarding consciousness, human thought, memory, and the nature of identity.
    An Alien Helped Me with My Homework

    An Alien Helped Me with My Homework

    $16.95
    More Info

    Jax Bishop wonders how he'll ever finish his report on space that he left to the last minute. Now it's school break and the big soccer game is coming up. But when he turns on his laptop, Zaria from the planet Zix appears on his screen. She's made contact with Jax so she can interview an Earthling for her special Zorketh training. They decide to collaborate, and Zaria starts - by turning Jax's room into a black hole! Things get weirder when Ollie, Jax's big shaggy dog, starts to communicate with Zaria. And when Jax's best friend, Jefferson, bursts into Jax's room, things really get complicated. Can Jax keep everything under control - or is his own personal alien at risk of being discovered?

    Note to Teachers, Parents, Grandparents, and Caregivers: An Alien Helped Me with My Homework! is for readers ages 8-12. It has black and white comic-style sketches at the beginning of each chapter and 35 high resolution images from NASA and other organizations. All of the science information has been fact checked by a senior astrophysicist. Each chapter ends with a simple simulation that the reader can try. Important words/concepts (e.g., the categories of black holes) are italicized in the text and defined in a glossary at the end of the book. Ideas to think about and interesting additional facts are provided in star-shaped inserts in the margins.