"Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have a large and passionate following. Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last? In...

"This book introduces a method of reasearch which can be used in various fields of mathematics. It examines, in a systematic way, the quantitative characterizations of the "deviation from a (given) property", called the "defect of a property", in: set theory; topology; measure theory; real, complex and functional analysis; algebra; geometry; number theory; fuzzy mathematics"--P. [2] of cover.