For All Practical Purposes: Mathematical Literacy in Today's World

by Comap

The leading applied text for the liberal arts mathematics course returns, ready to help students develop the mathematical literacy needed to vote smartly, shop wisely, plan finances, and support their opinions. In the new edition you will find a wealth of new and updated content, enhanced pedagogy, and expanded media options, including the new MathPortal. Energize your classroom with real-world problem solving! Get FAPP!

Genres: Mathematics, Textbooks, School

780 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1987

Reviews

[Kyle]

A very good text for an advanced high school student. It covers wide-ranging topics in an interesting non-proof method based way. It would certainly help with numerical literacy if people had something like it. The chapters on social choice theory should probably be required for every person living in a democracy. It teaches you how voting systems are never perfect and the trade-offs that are required for them to function as some measure of a choice of the people.

There are a few typos, though not too many to mar the book. The physics sections uses customary units (never discussing pounds-force and pounds-mass) and misapplies a scaling law in a problem, but overall does a good job as an introduction.

The front chapters of the book are probably the most proof-like which may put some people off, while the last chapters are very calculation heavy (which were just number-crunching for me and so skippable, while the content in the chapters were a bit more engaging).

Overall, a well-done mathematics text that I would certainly recommend to anyone who would like to get a bit of a flavor of practical mathematics without throwing them into proofs or physics applications that will be too advanced for most.

[Nuray Kargi]

for my lesson I want to read the book, we were talking about examples from book so what else is in the book

[Bradley]

Fall semester 2015. Used in my math class.