Street-fighting mathematics. The art of educated guessing and opportunistic problem solving

Аннотация

Mathematicians see mathematics as an area of study in its own right. The rest of us use mathematics as a precise language for expressing relationships among quantities in the real world, and as a tool for deriving quantitative conclusions from these relationships. For that purpose, mathematics courses, as they are taught today, are seldom helpful and are often downright destructive. An antidote to mathematical rigor mortis, teaching how to guess answers without needing a proof or an exact calculation.