✍ Scribed by Stewart, Ian
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Opening another drawer in his Cabinet of Curiosities, renowned mathematics professor Ian Stewart presents a new medley of games, paradoxes, and riddles in Professor Stewart’s Hoard of Mathematical Treasures. With wit and aplomb, Stewart mingles casual puzzles with grander forays into ancient and modern mathematical thought.
Amongst a host of arcane and astonishing facts about every kind of number from irrational and imaginary to complex and cuneiform, we learn:
• How to organize chaos
• How matter balances anti-matter
• How to turn a sphere inside out (without creasing it)
• How to calculate pi by observing the stars
• …and why you can’t comb a hairy ball.
Along the way Stewart offers the reader tantalizing glimpses of the mathematics underlying life and the universe. Mind-stretching, enlightening, and endlessly amusing, Professor Stewart’s Hoard of Mathematical Treasures will stimulate, delight, and enthrall.
For an exceptional reader, this book could mean a million dollars. For among the many doors that Stewart opens into the wonderland of mathematics, one offers a tantalizing perspective on the Riemann hypothesis, a conjecture so rich with implications that philanthropists have offered a million-dollar prize to anyone who can prove it. Of course, armchair mathematicians are not likely to find the path to that money. But they are certain to find pleasure in this cornucopia of puzzles, brainteasers, and digressions. Readers will delight, for instance, in testing their wits against Euclid’s theorems, in enlarging their understanding of geometry by constructing antigravity cones, and in allying themselves with an ancient genius by calculating just how much Archimedes could have moved the earth with his famous fulcrum. But besides inviting his readers to exercise their gray matter, Stewart initiates them into vertigo-inducing mysteries, including the wild dynamics of chaos and the unearthly beauty of logarithmic spirals. The ideal book for dispelling the supposed drudgery of mathematics with its real magic. --Bryce Christensen
** Booklist**
“[Armchair mathematicians] are certain to find pleasure in this cornucopia of puzzles, brainteasers, and digressions…. The ideal book for dispelling the supposed drudgery of mathematics with its real magic.”
** New Scientist**
“Stewart has a genius for explanation that allows details of the Poincaré conjecture and Riemann hypothesis to sit happily alongside a quip about a chicken crossing a Möbius strip…. Mathematics doesn’t come more entertaining than this.”
** Chicago Tribune**
“The exciting side of math – puzzles, games and thrilling oddities.”
** Science News**
“What positive integer is equal to its own Scrabble score when spelled out in full? Stewart…offers this and a hodgepodge of other puzzles, paradoxes, brainteasers, tricks, facts and jokes, which he accurately calls ‘curiosities.’.”
** IEEE Spectrum**
“Open one of the 179 ‘drawers’ in Professor Stewart’s cabinet, and you might find just a one-liner…or a seven-page essay on Fermat’s last theorem…. The book can be devoured in one giant gulp or savored, one curiosity at a time.”
** The College Mathematics Journal**
“[A] high-speed, nonetheless in-depth romp through elementary and advanced mathematical topics, accessible to any interested reader willing to expend a little effort.”
** Mathematics Teacher**
“The puzzles are entertaining…. The book’s topics, which will appeal to mathematics teachers at all levels, both amused and fascinated me.”
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