Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical CuriositiesKnowing that the most exciting math is not taught in school, Professor Ian Stewart has spent years filling his cabinet with intriguing mathematical games, puzzles, stories, and factoids intended for the adventurous mind. This book reveals the most exhilarating oddities from Professor Stewart's legendary cabinet. Inside, you will find 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, and the real reason why you can't divide anything by zero. Scattered among these are keys to Fermat's last theorem, the Poincaré conjecture, chaos theory, and the P=NP problem (you'll win a million dollars if you solve it). You never know what enigmas you'll find in the Stewart cabinet, but they're sure to be clever, mind-expanding, and delightfully fun. |
Contents
Start Here | 1 |
Popup Dodecahedron | 7 |
Shaggy Dog Story | 16 |
Extracting the Cherry | 22 |
Knights Tours | 28 |
Much Undo About Knotting | 29 |
How to do Lots of Mathematics | 43 |
Pythagorean Triples | 58 |
The Most Likely Digit | 106 |
AprèsLeSki | 124 |
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 |
How Old Was Diophantus? | 71 |
If You Thought Mathematicians Were Good | 72 |
Langfords Cubes | 78 |
Compensating Errors | 84 |
Tom Fools Knot | 90 |
What is the Golden Number? | 96 |
The Plastic Number | 103 |
The Missing Symbol | 196 |
Dont Get the Goat | 202 |
Gödels Theorems | 205 |
AntiAtheism | 220 |
The Milk Crate Problem | 235 |
Professor Stewarts Cunning Crib Sheet | 251 |
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