Street-Fighting Mathematics (2008)

The readings for each session are designed to be read after attending that session. For a listing of the topics discussed in each session, see here: (PDF)

Published Textbook

Mahajan, Sanjoy. Street-Fighting Mathematics: The Art of Educated Guessing and Opportunistic Problem Solving. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780262514293. The book is available as a free download (PDF) from MIT Press.

Textbook (Earlier Edition)

An earlier version of the textbook as one file may be found here: (PDF - 1.3 MB) Title page and table of contents (PDF) References (PDF)

SES #

TOPICS

READINGS

1

Dimensions

Chapter 1 - Dimensions, pp. 3-12 (PDF) Questions from lecture 1 (PDF)

2

Extreme cases

Chapter 2 - Extreme cases, pp. 13-26 (PDF) Questions and answers from lecture 2 (PDF)

3

Application: drag

Chapter 2 - Extreme cases, pp. 26-30 (PDF) Questions from lecture 3 (PDF)

4

More on drag

 

5

Discretization

Chapter 3 - Discretization, pp. 31-40 (PDF)

6

Application: pendulum period

Chapter 3 - Discretization, pp. 41-44 (PDF)

7

Picture proofs

Chapter 4 - Picture proofs, pp. 45-56 (PDF)

8

Taking out the big part

Chapter 5 - Taking out the big part, pp. 57-79 (PDF)

9

Analogy

Chapter 6 - Analogy, pp. 80-85 (PDF)

10

Application: operators

Chapter 7 - Operators, pp. 86-90 (PDF)

11

Application: singing logarithms

Handout - approximating logarithms using musical intervals (PDF)