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

by Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications

The fifth edition of this text for non-science students retains its focus on real-world examples and applications, while introducing a number of content and pedagogical changes. An on-line companion is also available.

Genres: Mathematics, Textbooks, School

784 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1987

About the author

A non-profit organization offering multidisciplinary and academically rigorous curriculum materials and teacher development programs based on mathematical exploration of real-world problems. Developers of the PBS television series "For All Practical Purposes: An Introduction to Contemporary Mathematics," "Against All Odds: Inside Statistics," and "Algebra: In Simplest Terms," COMAP also freely offers its semi-annual periodical Consortium, which "blends contemporary teaching activities with commentaries, articles and contests to bring the excitement of mathematical modeling to high school classrooms." Elementary projects include Bridges to Classroom Mathematics, which created materials that local school personnel can use to conduct professional development workshops for elementary teachers; and the ARC Center (Alternatives for Rebuilding Curricula), a collaboration between COMAP and Investigations in Number, Data, and Space (TERC), Math Trailblazers (University of Illinois at Chicago), and Everyday Mathematics (University of Chicago) — three elementary mathematics curriculum projects that received support from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Reviews

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.