Bøger af Robert Kaplan

Moving between narrative and reflection, and reveling in the genre of the long poem, Robert Kaplan uses detailed imagery to invite the reader into a slice of 1980s New York City: the urban landscape, the national politics, gay exuberance and loss, and, weaving throughout, the shadow of the AIDS epidemic. The title poem, "Past/Present," which is the first half of the book, sprawls through layers of time, failed romance, geographic movement, and growing self-awareness as the narrator sheds multiple selves to find his core. The poems in the second half of the book (re)create a sensory and personal landscape which becomes a metaphorical and meditative platform upon which to address questions of memory, identity, relationships, and how to navigate through an increasingly unstable world.

Who hasn't feared the math Minotaur in its labyrinth of abstractions? Now, in Out of the Labyrinth, Robert and Ellen Kaplan--the founders of The Math Circle, the popular learning program begun at Harvard in 1994--reveal the secrets behind their highly successful approach, leading readers outof the labyrinth and into the joyous embrace of mathematics. Written with the same wit and clarity that made Robert Kaplan's The Nothing That Is an international bestseller, Out of the Labyrinth offers an engaging and practical guide for parents and educators, and a delight for anyone interested in sharing the pleasures of mathematics. The Kaplans begin bydescribing the state of modern math education--the lockstep acquisition of "skills," "number facts," and "mad minute" calculations. Instead, they argue, math should be taught as the highest form of intellectual play, an endeavor to be explored and enjoyed by children (or adults) of any age. One byone, they dismantle the many barriers to appreciating mathematics, from the self-defeating belief that mathematical talent is inborn, to the off-putting language of mathematics, to the question of why anyone should care. They show, for instance, that mathematical ability is not a matter of inborngenius, but of doggedness and attention. Even Einstein admitted that "I know perfectly well that I myself have no special talents. It was curiosity, obsession, and sheer perseverance that brought me to my ideas." Enhanced throughout with puzzles, practical equations, and colorful anecdotes from their own classrooms, Out of the Labyrinth will delight readers with its engaging exploration of mathematics. It will allow students, parents, teachers, and others to wrestle with the accessible mysteries ofmath--and discover their inner math genius.

Robert Kaplan's The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero was an international best-seller, translated into eight languages. The Times called it "elegant, discursive, and littered with quotes and allusions from Aquinas via Gershwin to Woolf" and The Philadelphia Inquirer praised it as"absolutely scintillating." In this delightful new book, Robert Kaplan, writing together with his wife Ellen Kaplan, once again takes us on a witty, literate, and accessible tour of the world of mathematics. Where The Nothing That Is looked at math through the lens of zero, The Art of the Infinite takes infinity, in itscountless guises, as a touchstone for understanding mathematical thinking. Tracing a path from Pythagoras, whose great Theorem led inexorably to a discovery that his followers tried in vain to keep secret (the existence of irrational numbers); through Descartes and Leibniz; to the brilliant, hauntedGeorg Cantor, who proved that infinity can come in different sizes, the Kaplans show how the attempt to grasp the ungraspable embodies the essence of mathematics. The Kaplans guide us through the "Republic of Numbers," where we meet both its upstanding citizens and more shadowy dwellers; and wetravel across the plane of geometry into the unlikely realm where parallel lines meet. Along the way, deft character studies of great mathematicians (and equally colorful lesser ones) illustrate the opposed yet intertwined modes of mathematical thinking: the intutionist notion that we discovermathematical truth as it exists, and the formalist belief that math is true because we invent consistent rules for it. "Less than All," wrote William Blake, "cannot satisfy Man." The Art of the Infinite shows us some of the ways that Man has grappled with All, and reveals mathematics as one of the most exhilarating expressions of the human imagination.

Senior executives, however, sometimes require a richer feedback experience - one which might also include one or more of the following: detailed verbatim descriptions of performance, observations from family members and friends, psychometric measures of personality and motivation, and data on early history, plus an extended coaching relationship with a professional in leadership development. With this added scope and power, however, comes increased risk, which makes it essential that additional precautions be taken. In this report, the authors offer guidelines for how enhanced feedback can be provided safely and effectively.

A rich, realistic, and useful analysis of the problems of decision making in an organization. This text introduces the student to the more important concepts of both organization theory and decision theory as they apply to managing decisions.