All too often, through common school mathematics, students find themselves excelling in school math classes by memorizing formulas, but not their applications or the motivation behind them. As a consequence, understanding derived in this manner is tragically based on little or no proof. This is why studying proofs is paramount! Proofs help us understand the nature of mathematics and show us the key to appreciating its elegance. But even getting past the concern of "why should this be true?" students often face the question of "when will I ever need this in life?" Proofs in Competition Math aims to remedy these issues at a wide range of levels, from the fundamentals of competition math all the way to the Olympiad level and beyond. Don't worry if you don't know all of the math in this book; there will be prerequisites for each skill level, giving you a better idea of your current strengths and weaknesses and allowing you to set realistic goals as a math student. So, mathematical minds, we set you off!

For anyone who has ever wondered how computers solve problems, an engagingly written guide for nonexperts to the basics of computer algorithms. Have you ever wondered how your GPS can find the fastest way to your destination, selecting one route from seemingly countless possibilities in mere seconds? How your credit card account number is protected when you make a purchase over the Internet? The answer is algorithms. And how do these mathematical formulations translate themselves into your GPS, your laptop, or your smart phone? This book offers an engagingly written guide to the basics of computer algorithms. In Algorithms Unlocked, Thomas Cormen—coauthor of the leading college textbook on the subject—provides a general explanation, with limited mathematics, of how algorithms enable computers to solve problems. Readers will learn what computer algorithms are, how to describe them, and how to evaluate them. They will discover simple ways to search for information in a computer; methods for rearranging information in a computer into a prescribed order (“sorting”); how to solve basic problems that can be modeled in a computer with a mathematical structure called a “graph” (useful for modeling road networks, dependencies among tasks, and financial relationships); how to solve problems that ask questions about strings of characters such as DNA structures; the basic principles behind cryptography; fundamentals of data compression; and even that there are some problems that no one has figured out how to solve on a computer in a reasonable amount of time.

Quentin Jacobson has spent a lifetime loving Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs into his life - dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge - he follows. After their all-nighter ends, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo has disappeared.