Quantify!: A Crash Course in Smart Thinking

Essays and examples that reveal how scientists figure things out: "An excellent piece of work with lots of fascinating information." —Brian Clegg, Popular Science

Göran Grimvall is determined to help mere mortals understand how scientists get to the kernel of perplexing problems. Entertaining and enlightening, his latest book uses examples from sports, literature, and nature—as well as from the varied worlds of science—to illustrate how scientists make sense of and explain the world around us.

Grimvall's fun-to-read essays and easy-to-follow examples detail how order-of-magnitude estimation, extreme cases, dimensional analysis, and other modeling methods work. They also reveal how nonscientists absorb these concepts and use them at home, school, and work.

These simple, elegant explanations will help you tap into your inner scientist. Read this book and enjoy your own "Aha!" moment.

"A wonderful read for everyone, emphasizing how scientists and engineers tend to think about examples from daily life that are expressed by numbers . . . Highly recommended." —Choice

© 2010 Johns Hopkins University Press (Ebook): 9780801899676

Release date

Ebook: 1 December 2010