Marks-and-Numbers

I remember the first time I touched this book, i fell so in love with it that it was very hard for me to remember how many other things I had to do during my day. It really illustrated how every problem you solve (or at least try really hard) can be an entire lesson you can use later on.
It is very well organized, even the problems in each section are set in a way that each one helps with the previous one in case a more creative solution doesn't show up...
I love this book, and I really recommend it for any student studying for any math contest around the world. It really helped me, and I'm sure it will do the exact same thing to anyone with the desire to spend countless hours solving beautiful math problems. Good luck, God bless you all :)
Pura vida.

This is a marvelous book for lovers of mathematical problems. Scattered about are wonderful problems in Geometry, Trig, Algebra and Analysis, Invariants, and Number Theory. A truly delightful read that will have you working on some problems for hours. Each section introduces the reader to the concept or technique needed to solve the problems in each section. The problem sets start off with a few "warm-up" problems that quickly build up to some that require keen (some brilliant!) insight. A true gem among most problem books since this book is not merely a book of problems, but also contains clear presentations and introductions to various concepts in mathematics. The solutions are a true delight, the ingenuity and beauty of mathematical problem solving is captured exquisitely in this fabulous book. Highly Recommended. A++

The book, Mathematical Olympiad Challenges", is a delightful book on problem solving written by two of the leaders of the craft. Mathematical problem solving is a skill that can be honed like any other and this book is an ideal tool for the job. Problem solving usually involves elementary mathematics; this does not mean "easy mathematics". An elementary mathematical problem is one that is easily stated and can be understood by anyone who has had basic training in the subject (up to calculus). The solution, though, may be quite hard and may require a great deal of ingenuity and thought.

It should be noted that being an exceptional problem solver does not necessarily make one a good mathematician, but it helps. This is certainly true of the second author who is also a renowned mathematician in the field of knot theory and three dimensional topology.

As mentioned the two authors have a sterling record in the arena of problem solving and in coaching would be problem solvers. I am more familiar with Razvan Gelca who led the University of Michigan team to a top five finish in the highly competitive and extremely challenging Putnam exam. This exam is administered yearly and is open to all college students in North America; usually around 430 universities and colleges send teams to compete in the Putnam. The exam has been offered since the thirties and finishing at the top carries a great deal of prestige. Razvan's superior abilities led to the spectacular success of the Michigan team which was no mean feat.

My own experience with the book has been one of revelation with each passing page. I used the book to teach the problem solving course at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and it helped me immensely. The book possesses a variety of topics in elementary mathematics, ranging from algebra to geometry to trigonometry to number theory. Each chapter is divided into sections and each section has a theme. In keeping with the theme, the authors mention some useful formulae and/or facts that may be used in that section. This is followed by a demonstration of some dazzling problem solving techniques applied to a couple of problems. This is then followed by a list of challenging problems of varying levels of difficulty, all related to the theme of the section. There are roughly 18 such sections and many, many problems to think about. The rest of the book, which is the bulk of it, is dedicated to providing elegant solutions to every problem posed in the first part. Occasionally a problem merits more than one solution and sometimes the way is pointed to some interesting mathematics. The authors also acknowledge the source of many of the problems in the book which is a good indicator of the pedigree of the problem. Almost every solution is a gem and each problem demands its own style of solution. As noted earlier, problem solving is a skill and the authors try and succeed in conveying that idea in the problems and solutions they present.

Here is a sample problem from the book; if you can't do it and want to know how, check out the book:

"Show that any cube can be divided into 'n' cubes for any integer 'n' bigger than 54."

In summary if you are interested in figuring out puzzles, if you are a problem solver of elementary mathematical problems, or if you are just plain curious how a large fraction of mathematicians got hooked on mathematics, I would highly recommend you give this book a try. You may learn something and may even enjoy yourself in the process.

This is one of the most prolific books Terry has written. The information included is based on real investigations into areas most people would not know how to begin getting into.

I know Terry personally, and his abilities as an investigator really come out in his writtings. The information in Mark of the New World Order will help anyone to understand how far we have come toward the full implimentation of Big Brother. Terry writes as well as he speaks, and anyone hearing his seminars would be as excited about his information in person as they would be in reading this highly informative work.Terry, keep up to great work!

I couldn't put it down! Informative, comprehensive, easy-to-read, and well documented, "Mark" is probably the best book I've read on the possibilities of end-time government control. The technology is all ready, and after reading the book, one is compelled to admit that we may be closer than we think to total Big Brother control. Well worth reading.

its one of the best books in this day and age. it tells it like it is. im well pleaseed with this book. it opens up things that i was never aware of with our goverment. and yes its true about this new world order how there all set up now and they been ready. terry talks about controlling and tracking man kind rich or poor old young. this book you have to read. you will know more now than you did all your life after reading this book. the new world order.

my son loves kipper's show and his books, we read every day.

btw, kipper is an english corgie.

my grandchildren love Kipper....my only question is what kind of dog do the readers think he is?? I can't seem to even find the answer on the internet.

Okay, so a book that shows the numbers one through ten is nothing to get really excited about. Still, I really loved this one. Kipper is very cute and he gets to count neat things. Most books count fire engines or dots. Boring. Kipper plays with snails, hedgehogs, and moles! Great illustrations. Fun!

I use this book extensively with my Little League team to help the kids learn about the game. I give each player a "homework" assignment to learn about players who wore their number. This is great for connecting to the history of the game.

I have always wondered about the numbers. It's really cool to know, and this knowledge has enriched my enjoyment of the game. This book makes a great reference, if you can keep your friends from taking it home with them.

Typically, historical reviews can be dry and humorless. However, this one is filled with the author's dry humor. It is a side of historical law you never saw before. You must read this one.

One Is The Loneliest Number On the Road and Behind The Scenes With The Legendary Rock Band THREE DOG NIGHT by Jimmy Greenspoon with Mark Bego

"Jimmy Greenspoon, keyboardist of Three Dog Night, was a 20-year drug and alcohol addict who barely survived to tell his story...tales of all-night drug and sex orgies, musical jams, stadium-filled tours, and legendary recording sessions are recommended for those interested in this popular band from the late 1960's and early 70's." --Gary M. Krebs / "The Rock and Roll Reader's Guide"

"Jimmy Greenspoon, the keyboard player for Three Dog Night, one of the top rock groups of the 1970's, has written his and the group's story...the group's fame left Greenspoon broke and a heroin junkie. He is now a recovering addict...his book takes a tough look at life on the fast, fast track! --"The Arizona Daily Star"

"Prime dirt!...(A) hardcover wade through the fertile waters of sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll!" --"Radio & Records"

"As wild and woolly as any rock biography as you're liable to come across!" --"Reading For Pleasure"

JIMMY GREENSPOON has been a member of Three Dog Night since the very beginning. He continues to tour with the band, and makes his home in Northern Arizona.

MARK BEGO is the author of over 30 books on rock & roll and show business, including the 1998 "New York Times Best-Seller, Leonardo Di Caprio: Romantic Hero. He has his own blend of coffee, manufactured by Melitta. END

Everybody who has ever wondered what the problem was with the Markan Genre(and who hasn't!) needs to read this book. What a page turner! I couldn't put it down. I can't wait for number 4 to come out. The book was only 224 pages so it probably didn't take too long to write. If Dr. Vines takes a little more time on the next book, it could be even more in-depth. Keep up the good work Mike!

A gem of a book. Fun, easy to read. Starts with a number theoretic contribution of Viete (who made a step toward formulating algebraic questions with alphabetic symbols, a task later carried out by his countrymen Descartes and Fermat) and goes on to discuss the statistical distributions of blocks of digits appearing in decimal expansions of numbers. For a related discussion see Niven's "Irrational Numbers". Statistical distributions of blocks of digits are used implicitly and explicitly in symbollic dynamics in deterministic chaos. A word of warning: so-called 'normal numbers' occupy the continuum with measure one, but most irrational numbers (with measure one) are not computable. Champernowne's number (in any integer base of arithmetic) is the only known computable normal number. The convergence of its digit blocks to an even distribution is too slow for use in generating pseudorandom numbers. On the other hand, the digits of pi play good 5-handed poker for about 500000 base 10 digits, but we do not know if pi is normal to any base!

I read this book because Tom and Mary Poppendieck recommended it to me at XP Day 3 (Their book on Lean Software Development is a must read.). It is an important book because it places Return on Investment (ROI) at the heart of IT prioritisation and decision making. If your company is not doing this, then it will have lots of trouble with its IT projects. The book explains ROI and Net Present Value (NPV) and then presents a heuristic for delivering the optimal deliver of ROI. The heuristic depends on having groups of functionality with associated revenues (These groups are called Minimum Marketable Functions or MMFs). The book then presents a methodology for delivering optimal ROI that works with RUP or Agile. I'm tempted to try out the heuristic although I suspect that most decent project managers could work out the optimal delivery without the use of the heuristic (one of the approaches they suggest.).

The big question that the book leaves me with is "Where do the revenue figures come from?" The book gives an unsatisfactory single sentence answer along the lines that they are produced by marketing and the business.

Overall I liked the book, it is well written and easy to read. My one contention is that the RUP chapters comes before the one on Agile. ;-)

This book draws from a number of existing, proven practices and combines them into a synergistic approach in which the whole exceeds the sum of the parts. The focus of this book is iterative development, so if you are in an environment that employs the waterfall development life cycle the some of the material will not be as useful. As a side note - the waterfall SDLC is anything but dead, unfortunately. First, the parts - there are two main ideas set forth in the book:

(1) Viewing software as a collection of minimum marketable features (MMFs), which requires a radical shift in thinking. This is especially true because most of us have been trained to approach software from a function points or source lines of code (or from the viewpoint of the constructive cost model). The MMF view is ideal for determining the value of software to an organization as a business proposition, whereas FPs, SLOCs and other methods are for estimating development effort. Adding MMF means you have a new dimension to consider when making the go/no-go decision to proceed with a development project, making it an ideal factor during discovery and inception, and for governance purposes.

(2) Incrementally funding development--called "Incremental Funding Method" or "IFM" for short--which is similar to the progress payments concept in earned value project management. In essence IFM ties funding to delivery, which is ideally suited to iterative development. There are safeguards incorporated into this approach, such as a requirement for accurate cost forecasts, which have obvious dependencies on schedule and resources. However, since IFM is tied to net present value, this is where true value to be achieved from the software viewed as MMFs is determined. Since iterative development a fluid approach and accurate forecasts cannot be made beyond a single iteration the authors have devised an innovative solution to the problem by using sequence-adjusted net present value, which ties NPV to MMF and adjusts them through each iteration.

The whole - this book treats software development as value creation, and provides a workable solution to establishing and managing the value of software to business throughout the development life cycle. If the book ended here it would only be theory. What the authors did to make this book essential reading and to add credibility to their approach is provide two case studies--one for the RUP development approach and one for those in the agile camp--as well as a wealth of other information in the later chapters that show how to effectively deal with intangibles and decision making. What is remarkable is this is done in less than 200 pages. This book is an important work and should be read by IT executive management, project managers and software engineering managers.

For the past five years I have been a consultant, helping companies analyze the link between the products they buy and the financial impact those products make on their businesses. During that time I've poured over numerous books on the subject of ROI and tried to make sense of them in the context of real world environments. Most books fail to make a contribution to real world problems because they are typically too academic, unrealistic or they are too vague.

However, I'm very impressed with this book.

This book clearly outlines an excellent, flexible methodology for real world technology resource management that MAXIMIZES BUSINESS IMPACT. It's different from other approaches I've seen in the past. I can tell from the authors' examples and analysis that there is a real synthesis between disciplined academic approach and real life project management. Even after five years of study, there were a lot of new ideas that I hadn't seen elsewhere.

I think this book applies to a wide audience within IT development. CIOs can gain a lot of ground from reading this book and instilling this approach across their organization. Technology managers who have come up the ranks from being smart technicians MUST read this book to take the leap from coder to business manager. Business analysts ought to read this book to optimize their tradeoff of features and functions versus resources.

I think that if my clients embraced the approach in this book, they'd see a lot of cash crunch problems disappear. I recommend it to all of them.

Aside from Twain's depiction of God as a malevolent and mischevious deity, the story illustrates Twain's pessimistic view of Christianity in general. There is much vitriol spilled - toward God - at the end of the work. Certainly the death of Twain's daughter had much to do with excentuating this antagonism towards God and religion. Mysterious Stranger, especially the chilling conclusion, is a disturbing tale - as Twain no doubt intended it to be. A worthwhile read but be prepared to have your religious moorings and faith shaken.

this volume spans the length of Mark Twain's career, and contains some of his most famous shorter works, which all centre on the subject of Money. 'The Celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County' is the most perfect tall tale in the English language, three flawless pages about Jim Smiley and the bizarre sidelines he would investigate to win a bet, any bet, written in a miraculous mid-19th century California vernacular. If that isn't enough, Twain tops it with the best closing paragraph of any work I have ever read ever.

'The $1,000,000 Bank note' is almost surreal, or Marxist, the story of a derelict made an unwitting guinea pig by two elderly millionaires, curious to see what would happen to an honest but poor man in the possession of such an impractible note. The frightening fetishistic power of currency structures a somewhat creepily benevolent narrative, and the opening paragraphs audaciously cram a novel's worth of misfortune.

'The Man who corrupted Hadleyburg' is the masterpiece here, at once an unforgiving morality tale about the temptation of money on an incorruptible town, and a satire on the crippling effect of bogus social respectability. Twain's irony is at its most relentless here, mixing anger at elite hypocrisy with distaste for the savage mob mentality. The scenes of public justice are hilarious but terrifying; the unnamed man taking monstrous revenge on a whole town for a personal slight, exposing its shams by an experiment, could well be Twain himself.

The same could be said of the hero of his novella 'The Mysterious Stranger', Twain's last, posthumously published work. In this, an angel, Satan, nephew of his infernal namesake, comes to a late 16th century Austrian mountain village and systematically exposes the murderous herd instincts, moral deceptions and shabby pretensions of the human condition. Everything - war, religion, society, justice, family, human aspiration, childhood innocence - is ground down with misanthropic, sub-Swiftian satire.

'Stranger' is not an easy book to like. As an historical novel, it is an utter failure, with no attempt to understand the mindset, never mind the language, idiom or customs of an alien culture. As an allegory for the contemporary America in which Twain was writing, the book is indispensible, insightful, brave, bracing, honest, incredibly prescient, but monotonous, flatly written and exhausting. As a supernatural fable, the book has little sense of wonder or of the unknown, but in its story of a devil wreaking subversive havoc on a socially repressive culture by playing on their hypocritical terms, 'Stranger' does look forward to Bulgakov's more successful 'The Master and Margarita'.

I have taught this book at the college level for a few years now; it definitely sheds Twain's unfortunate Americana image, and it reveals the darker genius of this "beloved" author. Twain's greatest work, The Mysterious Stranger will enrage fundamentalist Christians, several of whom have dropped my course because of this novella. Asking people to think about what is real, what is behind existence, though, is no crime and should be inoffensive. Young people who are harmed by systematic thinking will react to this book like people being deprogrammed from a cult: they will hate it. But Twain, who was in anguish when he wrote this, had the honesty to ask difficult questions. Read The Mysterious Stranger as a guide to Twain's futuristic thinking, his tribute to the mind above all other things.