Böcker av John Cramer

How alien would aliens be? Would they look like us or perhaps more like an octopus? How would they communicate? Could we even hear their voices, assuming they have them? Like us, aliens would be constrained by the physical world. Understanding how those physical constraints apply both to us and to aliens is the theme of this book. The constraints imply that they will not be all that different from us, perhaps half to twice as big as we are. They will depend on vision and hearing as we do and they will live on a planet much like ours. But where will they be? Do they even exist? The odds are not good. We may be the only intelligent life in the universe.

The name Diophantus has long been attached to what we call under-determined algebraic problems with more unknowns than information. He himself was short of good methods of attack but his work has been the jump off point for a great and hugely productive range of mathematical developments. His choice of word problems remains a source of fascination to this day and that is the topic of this book..

In case you haven't noticed, you get to choose the world you live in. I don't mean you can control the conditions of your life. You may have had little or no choice of the house you live in or even of the street where you live. Certainly most of us do not have any great deal of control over our economic, political and cultural circumstances. Where we do have a choice is in our outlook. We can, indeed we must, choose how we view the world. We can neither act nor think without holding some worldview even though it may be a relatively undeveloped one. This book is about making a good choice of your own worldview. Although there are many possible choices, deciding is actually fairly simple. Read on.