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AUTHOR |
Ekeland, Ivar. |
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TITLE |
Best of all possible worlds : mathematics and destiny. [中譯本]. |
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TITLE |
最佳可能的世界 : 數學與命運 / Ivar Ekeland著 ; 馮國萍, 張端智譯. |
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IMPRINT |
中國 : 科學, 2012. |
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DESCRIPTION |
146 p. ; 24 cm. |
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SUMMARY |
"Optimists believe this is the best of all possible worlds. Pessimists fear that might really be the case. But what is the best of all possible worlds? How do we define it? Is it the world that operates in the most efficient way? Or the one in which most people are comfortable and content? There was a time, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when scientists felt they could answer these questions." "This book is their story. Ivar Ekeland takes readers on a journey through scientific attempts to envision the best of all possible worlds. He begins with the French mathematician Maupertuis, whose least action principle asserted that everything in nature occurs in the way that requires the least possible action. This idea, Ekeland shows, was a pivotal breakthrough in science, because it was the first expression of the concept of optimization, or the design of systems that are the. |
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AWARD |
Choice's Outstanding Academic Title, 2007. |
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SUBJECT |
Ethics. |
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SUBJECT |
Human behavior. |
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SUBJECT |
Logic, Symbolic and mathematical. |
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SUBJECT |
Mathematical analysis. |
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SUBJECT |
Science -- Mathematics. |
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DISCIPLINE |
Mathematics. |
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OTHER AUTHOR |
張端智. trl. |
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OTHER AUTHOR |
馮國萍. trl. |
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ISBN |
9787030348302. |
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