The Beauty of Mathematics in Computer Science explains the mathematical fundamentals of information technology products and services we use every day, from Google Web Search to GPS Navigation, and from speech recognition to CDMA mobile services. The book was published in Chinese in 2011 and has sold more than 600,000 copies. Readers were surprised to find that many daily-used IT technologies were so tightly tied to mathematical principles. For example, the automatic classification of news articles uses the cosine law taught in high school.
The book covers many topics related to computer applications and applied mathematics including:
Natural language processing
Speech recognition and machine translation
Statistical language modeling
Quantitive measurement of information
Graph theory and web crawler
Pagerank for web search
Matrix operation and document classification
Mathematical background of big data
Neural networks and Google's deep learning
Jun Wu was a staff research scientist in Google who invented Google's Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Web Search Algorithms and was responsible for many Google machine learning projects. He wrote official blogs introducing Google technologies behind its products in very simple languages for Chinese Internet users from 2006-2010. The blogs had more than 2 million followers. Wu received PhD in computer science from Johns Hopkins University and has been working on speech recognition and natural language processing for more than 20 years. He was one of the earliest engineers of Google, managed many products of the company, and was awarded 19 US patents during his 10-year tenure there. Wu became a full-time VC investor and co-founded Amino Capital in Palo Alto in 2014 and is the author of eight books.
A series of essays introducing the applications of machine learning and statistics in natural language processing, speech recognition and web search for non-technical readers
"This volume originates from a series of blog articles by the author, who works as senior staff research scientist for Google China. The blog articles have been rewritten to make them more accessible to uninitiated readers. As a result, the book contains 29 chapters which may be read independently. The aim is to provide evidence for the beauty of mathematics and the wealth of its applications to the layman . . . The volume may be quite valuable for readers who want to get some insight into how enterprises like Google achieve their performance, and how much mathematics is at work in the background of many commonplace services . . . "
~Dieter Riebesehl (Lüneburg), zbMath
