Do you expect to find articles about mathematics in your daily newspaper? If you are a reader of The Guardian you do, or at least you did during the second half of the 1980s. This volume collects many of the columns Keith Devlin wrote for The Guardian. Read them and assign them to your students to read. This is a book for delving in, and is accessible to anyone with an interest in things mathematical. Devlin takes mathematical discoveries and explains them to the interested lay reader. The topics range from computer discoveries dealing with large prime numbers to much deeper results, such as...

The purpose of this book is to demonstrate that complex numbers and geometry can be blended together beautifully. This results in easy proofs and natural generalizations of many theorems in plane geometry, such as the Napoleon theorem, the Ptolemy-Euler theorem, the Simson theorem, and the Morley theorem. The book is self-contained - no background in complex numbers is assumed - and can be covered at a leisurely pace in a one-semester course. Many of the chapters can be read independently. Over 100 exercises are included. The book would be suitable as a text for a geometry course, or for a...

This humorous mathematical resource offers theory, trivia, poetry, puns, and quotes for a general audience interested in mathematics and science.

Underwood Dudley is well known for his collection of books on mathematical cranks. Here he offers yet another - angle trisectors. It is impossible to trisect angles with straightedge and compass alone, but many people try and think they have succeeded. This book is about angle trisections and the people who attempt them. According to Dudley: 'Hardly any mathematical training is necessary to read this book. There is a little trigonometry here and there, but it may be safely skipped. There are hardly any equations. There are no exercises and there will be no final examination. The worst victim...

Through hard experience mathematicians have learned to subject even the most 'evident' assertions to rigorous scrutiny, as intuition and facile reasoning can often be misleading. However, errors can slip past the most watchful eye, they are often subtle and difficult to detect; but when found they can teach us a lot and can present a real challenge to straighten out. This book collects together a mass of such errors, drawn from the work of students, textbooks, and the media, as well as from professional mathematicians themselves. Each of these items is carefully analysed and the source of the...

Martin Gardner is widely known for his writing on recreational mathematics, not least for the myriad problems he has devised over some 25 years for Scientific American. In this book are collected 36 of his best brainteasers. These are not simply cunning puzzles, but serve to illustrate the art of the mathematician as problem solver, and their solution draws on ideas from topology, probability, number theory, logic and beyond. Fully worked answers are given, which in turn lead to additional problems for the reader. For anybody who likes to solve mathematical problems this book will be both...

Eric Temple Bell (1883 1960) was a distinguished mathematician and a best selling popularizer of mathematics. His Men of Mathematics, still in print after almost sixty years, inspired scores of young readers to become mathematicians. Under the name of John Taine, he also published science fiction novels (among them The Time Stream, Before the Dawn, and The Crystal Horde) that served to broaden the subject matter of that genre during its early years. In The Search for E. T. Bell, Constance Reid has given us a compelling account of this complicated, difficult man who never divulged to anyone,...

This book is a country walk through the magical world of numbers. Most people will have recognised some of the fascinating patterns exhibited by many numbers; some of these indicate a deep and complex structure which is revealed in this book in a way that is accessible to all, from amateur to expert. The author focusses on powers of numbers, which have been studied from the time of Pythagoras until the present day, with the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Indeed some of the results described by the author were only established quite recently, giving the book a very contemporary flavour. In...

The anthology is a collection of articles contiguous to the humanities written by renowned mathematicians of the twentieth century.

A collection of surprising concurrences of lines with some typical methods for proving their existence.