By the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications.

Practical Purposes explores connections between what antebellum practitioners in Boston were reading and what they were building between 1827 and 1850. Along the way the book examines why some books on technical topics were preferred to others. Based on the books borrowed registers of the Boston Athenaeum, the book details reading in ten scientific and engineering fields including hydraulics, chemistry, mathematics, and geology.

The fundamental skill of tying knots is useful in countless situations, both indoors and out. The Book of Knots teaches you which knot to choose and exactly how to tie it, whether you’re constructing a trout fly, repairing a hammock, mooring a boat, securing a load to a car roof rack, or engaging in a rescue or survival situation. This invaluable manual explains through clear line diagrams and step-by-step descriptions how to tie more than 125 practical knots.

Contains complete solutions to odd-numbered problems in text.

For All Practical Purposes is the most effective and engaging textbook available for showing mathematics at work in areas with a direct impact on our lives (consumer products and advertising, politics, the economy, the Internet). It was the first, and remains the best, textbook for liberal arts students and for instructors who want to bring students the excitement of contemporary mathematical thinking and help their students think logically and critically. The new edition offers a number of changes designed to make the text more accessible than ever to a wider range of students and instructors.

In choosing between moral alternatives -- choosing between various forms of ethical action -- we typically make calculations of the following kind: A is better than B; B is better than C; therefore A is better than C. These inferences use the principle of transitivity and are fundamental to many forms of practical and theoretical theorizing, not just in moral and ethical theory but in economics. Indeed they are so common as to be almost invisible. What Larry Temkin's book shows is that, shockingly, if we want to continue making plausible judgments, we cannot continue to make these assumptions. Temkin shows that we are committed to various moral ideals that are, surprisingly, fundamentally incompatible with the idea that "better than" can be transitive. His book develops many examples where value judgments that we accept and find attractive, are incompatible with transitivity. While this might seem to leave two options -- reject transitivity, or reject some of our normative commitments in order to keep it -- Temkin is neutral on which path to follow, only making the case that a choice is necessary, and that the cost either way will be high. Temkin's book is a very original and deeply unsettling work of skeptical philosophy that mounts an important new challenge to contemporary ethics.