Dana Mackenzie

A pioneer of artificial intelligence shows how the study of causality revolutionized science and the world 'Correlation does not imply causation.' This mantra was invoked by scientists for decades in order to avoid taking positions as to whether one thing caused another, such as smoking and cancer and carbon dioxide and global warming. But today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution, sparked by world-renowned computer scientist Judea Pearl and his colleagues, has cut through a century of confusion and placed cause and effect on a firm scientific basis. Now, Pearl and science journalist Dana Mackenzie explain causal thinking to general readers for the first time, showing how it allows us to explore the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It is the essence of human and artificial intelligence. And just as Pearl's discoveries have enabled machines to think better, The Book of Why explains how we can think better.

You can't present the history of art without pictures; equally equations are central to any history of mathematics. Spanning 4,000 years of civilisation, The Story of Mathematics describes twenty -four great equations that have shaped science and society - from the elementary (1+1=2) to the sophisticated (the Black -Scholes formula) and from the famous (E=mc2) to the arcane (Hamilton's quaternion equations). This is a tale of genius, drama and beauty brought vividly to life in a compelli ng narrative by Dana Mackenzie and at the same time he tells us why these equations have something timeless to say about the universe.