front cover of Who Counts?
Who Counts?
The Mathematics of Death and Life after Genocide
Diane M. Nelson
Duke University Press, 2015
In Who Counts? Diane M. Nelson explores the social life of numbers, teasing out the myriad roles math plays in Guatemalan state violence, economic exploitation, and disenfranchisement, as well as in Mayan revitalization and grassroots environmental struggles. In the aftermath of thirty-six years of civil war, to count—both numerically and in the sense of having value—is a contested and qualitative practice of complex calculations encompassing war losses, migration, debt, and competing understandings of progress. Nelson makes broad connections among seemingly divergent phenomena, such as debates over reparations for genocide victims, Ponzi schemes, and antimining movements. Challenging the presumed objectivity of Western mathematics, Nelson shows how it flattens social complexity and becomes a raced, classed, and gendered skill that colonial powers considered beyond the grasp of indigenous peoples. Yet the Classic Maya are famous for the precision of their mathematics, including conceptualizing zero long before Europeans. Nelson shows how Guatemala's indigenous population is increasingly returning to Mayan numeracy to critique systemic inequalities with the goal of being counted—in every sense of the word. 
 
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front cover of The Wiener-Hopf Method in Electromagnetics
The Wiener-Hopf Method in Electromagnetics
Vito G. Daniele
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2014
This advanced research monograph is devoted to the Wiener-Hopf technique, a function-theoretic method that has found applications in a variety of fields, most notably in analytical studies of diffraction and scattering of waves. It provides a comprehensive treatment of the subject and covers the latest developments, illustrates the wide range of possible applications for this method, and includes an extensive outline of the most powerful analytical tool for the solution of diffraction problems.
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front cover of Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge, 1939
Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge, 1939
Ludwig Wittgenstein
University of Chicago Press, 1989
For several terms at Cambridge in 1939, Ludwig Wittgenstein lectured on the philosophical foundations of mathematics. A lecture class taught by Wittgenstein, however, hardly resembled a lecture.

He sat on a chair in the middle of the room, with some of the class sitting in chairs, some on the floor. He never used notes. He paused frequently, sometimes for several minutes, while he puzzled out a problem. He often asked his listeners questions and reacted to their replies. Many meetings were largely conversation.

These lectures were attended by, among others, D. A. T. Gasking, J. N. Findlay, Stephen Toulmin, Alan Turing, G. H. von Wright, R. G. Bosanquet, Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, and Yorick Smythies. Notes taken by these last four are the basis for the thirty-one lectures in this book.

The lectures covered such topics as the nature of mathematics, the distinctions between mathematical and everyday languages, the truth of mathematical propositions, consistency and contradiction in formal systems, the logicism of Frege and Russell, Platonism, identity, negation, and necessary truth. The mathematical examples used are nearly always elementary.
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