Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities

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Profile Books, Sep 3, 2010 - Mathematics - 320 pages

School maths is not the interesting part. The real fun is elsewhere. Like a magpie, Ian Stewart has collected the most enlightening, entertaining and vexing 'curiosities' of maths over the years... Now, the private collection is displayed in his cabinet.

There are some hidden gems of logic, geometry and probability -- like how to extract a cherry from a cocktail glass (harder than you think), a pop up dodecahedron, the real reason why you can't divide anything by zero and some tips for making money by proving the obvious. Scattered among these are keys to unlocking the mysteries of Fermat's last theorem, the Poincaré Conjecture, chaos theory, and the P/NP problem for which a million dollar prize is on offer. There are beguiling secrets about familiar names like Pythagoras or prime numbers, as well as anecdotes about great mathematicians. Pull out the drawers of the Professor's cabinet and who knows what could happen...

 

Contents

Start Here
1
Shaggy Dog Story
16
Much Undo About Knotting
29
How to do Lots of Mathematics
43
Pythagorean Triples
58
How Old Was Diophantus?
71
If You Thought Mathematicians Were Good
72
Langfords Cubes
78
Hippopotamian Logic
140
The Goldbach Conjecture
154
Nothing Up My Sleeve
166
What is e and Why?
172
What Day is It?
179
The Most Beautiful Formula
186
The Missing Symbol
196
Dont Get the Goat
202

Compensating Errors
84
Tom Fools Knot
90
What is the Golden Number?
96
The Plastic Number
103
The Most Likely Digit
106
AprèsLeSki
124
Gödels Theorems
205
AntiAtheism
220
The Milk Crate Problem
235
Professor Stewarts Cunning Crib Sheet
251
Copyright

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About the author (2010)

Ian Stewart is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University. He has published more than eighty books including Mathematics of Life , Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities , Professor Stewart's Hoard of Mathematical Treasures and The Science of Discworld trilogy with Terry Pratchett. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, appears frequently on radio and television, and does research on pattern formation and network dynamics.

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