Thinking Better: The Art Of The Shortcut [2023]

by Du Sautoy Marcus

ISBN: 9780008393915

Published: 2021-08-04

Thinking Better is a celebration of the art of the short cut - and an encouragement to all of us, in our lives and maybe particularly in our business lives, to realise that thinking better is often more successful than working faster. Mathematics is full of shortcuts inspired by better ways of thinking. It is these that facilitate so much of human progress, whether in constructing the first cities round the Euphrates 5000 years ago, using calculus to solve engineering problems in the Renaissance, or today's algorithms that shortcut ways of finding a new life partner. It was the lure of the shortcut that first drew (Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science) Marcus du Sautoy to become a mathematician. And now he has interrogated his passion for and knowledge of shortcuts to write a dazzling guide to over 2000 years of clever thinking. We may not be able to rely on computers to solve all of our problems - whether personal, or business, or even on a planetary level -...