E-Book Overview
Knowing 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 Poincare 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.
E-Book Content
Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities
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By the Same Author Concepts of Modern Mathematics Game, Set, and Math Does God Play Dice? Another Fine Math You’ve Got Me Into Fearful Symmetry (with Martin Golubitsky) Nature’s Numbers From Here to Infinity The Magical Maze Life’s Other Secret Flatterland What Shape is a Snowflake? The Annotated Flatland (with Edwin A. Abbott) Math Hysteria The Mayor of Uglyville’s Dilemma Letters to a Young Mathematician How to Cut a Cake Why Beauty is Truth Taming the Infinite with Jack Cohen The Collapse of Chaos Figments of Reality What Does a Martian Look Like? Wheelers (science fiction) Heaven (science fiction) with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen The Science of Discworld The Science of Discworld II: The Globe The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch
Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities
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There are three kinds of pe