Take an apple and cut it into five pieces. Would you believe that these five pieces can be reassembled in such a fashion so as to create two apples equal in shape and size to the original? Would you believe that you could make something as large as the sun by breaking a pea into a finite number of pieces and putting it back together again? Neither did Leonard Wapner, author of The Pea and the Sun, when he was first introduced to the Banach-Tarski paradox, which asserts exactly such a notion. Written in an engaging style, The Pea and the Sun catalogues the people, events, and mathematics that contributed to the discovery of Banach and Tarski's magical paradox. Wapner makes one of the most interesting problems of advanced mathematics accessible to the non-mathematician.
- 233 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1: History: A Cast of Characters
- 2: Jigsaw Fallacies and Other Curiosities
- 3: Preliminaries
- 4: Baby BTs
- 5: Statement and Proof of the Theorem
- 6: Resolution
- 7: The Real World
- 8: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
- Bibliography
- Index
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Yes, you can access The Pea and the Sun by Leonard M. Wapner in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Mathematics & Games in Mathematics. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.