03.09.09.

New books published today!

Today marks the publication of six Introducing books. Five of them are new in the compact format, and one, Eileen Magnello and Borin Van Loon's Introducing Statistics, is brand new. Here's more about each of the six:

FRACTALS by Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon, Will Rood and Ralph Edney

Fractal Geometry is the geometry of the natural world – animal, vegetable and mineral. It’s about the broken, wrinkled, wiggly world – the uneven shapes of nature, unlike the idealized forms of Euclidean geometry. We see fractals everywhere; indeed we are fractal!

Fractal Geometry is an extension of classical geometry. Using computers, it can make precise models of physical structures - from ferns to galaxies. Fractal geometry is a new language. Once you speak it, you can describe the shape of cloud as precisely as an architect can describe a house. Introducing Fractals traces the historical development of this mathematical discipline, explores its descriptive powers in the natural world, and then looks at the applications and the implications of the discoveries it has made.

As John Archibald Wheeler, protégé of Niels Bohr, friend of Albert Einstein and mentor of Richard Feynman has said, ‘No one will be considered scientifically literate tomorrow, who is not familiar with fractals’.

ISLAM by Ziauddin Sardar and Zafar Abbas Malik

slam is one of the world’s great monotheistic religions. Islamic culture, spanning 1,500 years, has produced some of the finest achievements of humanity.

Yet the religion followed by a fifth of humankind, including millions from diverse ethnic backgrounds in the US and Europe, is largely seen in the West in terms of fundamentalism, bigotry and violence, a perception reinforced by the terrorist atrocities in New York and Washington in 2001 and subsequent outrages.

But the real message of Islam is very far indeed from this picture, making it perhaps the least understood religion in the world. This informative guide recounts the history of Islam from the birth of Prophet Muhammad in the 6th century to its status as a global culture and political force today.

Charting the achievements of Muslim civilization, it explains the nature and message of the Qur’an, outlines the basic features of Islamic law, and assesses the impact of colonialism on Muslim societies.

Both timely and insightful, Introducing Islam shows how Muslims everywhere are trying to live their faith and are struggling to shape new Islamic ideas and ideals in a globalized world.

LINGUISTICS by R.L.Trask and Bill Mayblin

Language, it is widely understood, both sets us apart from our fellow creatures and identifies us as uniquely human.

We use language to establish and maintain group membership, to express our emotions, to amuse ourselves and to entertain others, to convey information serious and trivial and exist in a world populated by others. Linguistics is the discipline which studies the structure and functions of both individual languages and the phenomena of language itself.

In spite of early efforts by ancient and medieval scholars, most of our progress in understanding language has come only within the last century, and much of this scholarship is very recent indeed.

SOCIOLOGY by Richard Osborne and Borin Van Loon

What is sociology? Simply, it is the study of how society functions, or in some cases, does not function.

Various competing schools of sociology have attempted to fit observations of social phenomena into different conceptual systems. Introducing Sociology traces the origins of these systems from Enlightenment thought and the pioneering work of Auguste Comte to subsequent developments in Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber.

The rapid expansion of sociology in 20th-century America and Britain, the post-World War II dominance of Talcott Parsons, the Chicago School and the rise of Structuralism are brilliantly outlined in a clear, graphic form. The book also examines the array of concepts and methods of research that have been applied to the study of society by the key analysts.

STATISTICS by Eileen Magnello and Borin Van Loon

From the medicine we take, the treatments we receive, the aptitude and psychometric tests given by employers, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear to even the beer we drink, statistics have given shape to the world we inhabit.

For the media, statistics are routinely ‘damning’, ‘horrifying’, or, occasionally, ‘encouraging’.

Yet, for all their ubiquity, most of us really don’t know what to make of statistics. Exploring the history, mathematics, philosophy and practical use of statistics, Eileen Magnello – accompanied by Borin Van Loon’s intelligent graphic illustration – traces the rise of statistics from the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians and Chinese, to the censuses of Romans and the Greeks, and the modern emergence of the term itself in Europe.

She explores the ‘vital statistics’ of, in particular, William Farr, and the mathematical statistics of Karl Pearson and R.A. Fisher. She even tells how knowledge of statistics can prolong one’s life, as it did for evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, given eight months to live after a cancer diagnoses in 1982 – and he lived until 2002.

An enjoyable, surprise-filled tour through a subject that is both fascinating, and crucial to understanding our world

WITTGENSTEIN by John Heaton and Judy Groves

Ludwig Wittgenstein has somehow captured the popular imagination as the modern Socrates, the master of enigmatic logic, the fascinating and attractive icon of modernism. But what did Wittgenstein really say?

In Introducing Wittgenstein we meet a strange man, the rigorous logician who prized poetry above philosophy, who inherited an immense fortune and gave it all away, who sought death in the trenches of World War One, a great teacher who advised his students to give up philosophy, a tormented soul who thrived on jokes and crime fiction and a solitary who inspired lifelong friendships. We are also given a clear and accessible guide to his central works, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a glacier of logic, and his later, friendlier Philosophical Investigations.

Anyone intrigued by these works but too daunted to have read them will find this the ideal introduction to a great 20th century philosopher.

Click on the titles of each book to read more and buy online wherever in the world you are.