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Podcast: NBN Book of the Day
Episode: Robyn Arianrhod, "Vector: A Surprising Story of Space, Time, and Mathematical Transformation" (U of Chicago Press, 2024)
Description: A celebration of the seemingly simple idea that allowed us to imagine the world in new dimensions--sparking both controversy and discovery.
The stars of this book, vectors and tensors, are unlikely celebrities. If you ever took a physics course, the word "vector" might remind you of the mathematics needed to determine forces on an amusement park ride, a turbine, or a projectile. You might also remember that a vector is a quantity that has magnitude and (this is the key) direction. In fact, vectors are examples of tensors, which can represent even more data. It sounds simple...