TY - GEN AU - Chris Bernhardt TI - Beautiful Math: : the surprisingly simple ideas behind the digital revolution in how we live, work, and communicate SN - 9780262549776 AV - QA76.9.M35 PY - 2024///] CY - Cambridge, London PB - The MIT Press KW - Mathematics N1 - 1: Digital Revolutions 2: Information 3: Information, Redundancy, and Compression 4: Error Correction and Noise 5: Encryption 6: Analog-to-Digital Conversion 7: Computation 8: Machine Learning 9: Neural Networks N2 - In Beautiful Math, Chris Bernhardt explores the mathematics at the very heart of the information age. He asks questions such as: What is information? What advantages does digital information have over analog? How do we convert analog signals into digital ones? What is an algorithm? What is a universal computer? And how can a machine learn? The four major themes of Beautiful Math are information, communication, computation, and learning. Bernhardt typically starts with a simple mathematical model of an important concept, then reveals a deep underlying structure connecting concepts from what, at first, appear to be unrelated areas. His goal is to present the concepts using the least amount of mathematics, but nothing is oversimplified. Along the way, Bernhardt also discusses alphabets, the telegraph, and the analog revolution; information theory; redundancy and compression; errors and noise; encryption; how analog information is converted into digital information; algorithms; and, finally, neural networks. Historical anecdotes are included to give a sense of the technology at that time, its impact, and the problems that needed to be solved. --- summary provided by publisher ER -