Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities

Ian Stewart

• Publisher: Profile Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781846683459
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847651280
• Topic: Mathematics
• Subtopic: Mathematics General
• Index: Mathematics

School maths is not the interesting part. The real fun is elsewhere. Like a magpie, Ian Stewart has collected the most enlightening, entertaining and vexing 'curiosities' of maths over the years... Now, the private collection is displayed in his cabinet.

There are some 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, the real reason why you can't divide anything by zero and some tips for making money by proving the obvious. Scattered among these are keys to unlocking the mysteries of Fermat's last theorem, the Poincaré Conjecture, chaos theory, and the P/NP problem for which a million dollar prize is on offer. There are beguiling secrets about familiar names like Pythagoras or prime numbers, as well as anecdotes about great mathematicians. Pull out the drawers of the Professor's cabinet and who knows what could happen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Start Here
• Alien Encounter
• Tap-an-Animal
• Curious Calculations
• Triangle of Cards
• Pop-up Dodecahedron
• Sliced Fingers
• Turnip for the Books
• The Four-Colour Theorem
• Shaggy Dog Story
• Shaggy Cat Story
• Rabbits in the Hat
• River Crossing 1 – Farm Produce
• More Curious Calculations
• Extracting the Cherry
• Make Me a Pentagon
• What is π ?
• Legislating the Value of π
• If They Had Passed It . . .
• Empty glasses
• How Many—
• Three Quickies
• Knight’s Tours
• Much Undo About Knotting
• White-Tailed Cats
• To Find Fake Coin
• Perpetual Calendar
• Mathematical Jokes 1
• Deceptive Dice
• An Age-Old Old-Age Problem
• Why Does Minus Times Minus Make Plus?
• Heron Suit
• How to Unmake a Greek Cross
• How to Remember a Round Number
• The Bridges of Königsberg
• How to do Lots of Mathematics
• Euler’s Pentagonal Holiday
• Ouroborean Rings
• The Ourotorus
• Who Was Pythagoras?
• Proofs of Pythagoras
• A Constant Bore
• Fermat’s Last Theorem
• Pythagorean Triples
• Prime Factoids
• A Little-Known Pythagorean Curiosity
• Digital Century
• Squaring the Square
• Magic Squares
• Squares of Squares
• Ring a-Ring a-Ringroad
• Pure v. Applied
• Magic Hexagon
• Pentalpha
• Wallpaper Patterns
• How Old Was Diophantus?
• If You Thought Mathematicians Were Good at Arithmetic . . .
• The Sphinx is a Reptile
• Six Degrees of Separation
• Trisectors Beware!
• Langford’s Cubes
• Duplicating the Cube
• Magic Stars
• Curves of Constant Width
• Connecting Cables
• Coin Swap
• The Stolen Car
• Space-Filling Curves
• Compensating Errors
• The Square Wheel
• Why Can’t I Divide by Zero?
• River Crossing 2 – Marital Mistrust
• Wherefore Art Thou Borromeo?
• Percentage Play
• Kinds of People
• The Sausage Conjecture
• Tom Fool’s Knot
• New Merology
• Numerical Spell
• Spelling Mistakes
• Expanding Universe
• What is the Golden Number?
• What are the Fibonacci Numbers?
• The Plastic Number
• Family Occasion
• Don’t Let Go!
• Theorem: All Numbers are Interesting
• Theorem: All Numbers are Boring
• The Most Likely Digit
• Why Call It a Witch?
• Möbius and His Band
• Golden Oldie
• Three More Quickies
• Miles of Tiles
• Chaos Theory
• Après-Le-Ski
• Pick’s Theorem
• Mathematical Prizes
• Why No Nobel for Maths?
• Is There a Perfect Cuboid?
• Paradox Lost
• When Will My MP3 Player Repeat?
• Six Pens
• Patented Primes
• The Poincaré Conjecture
• Hippopotamian Logic
• Langton’s Ant
• Pig on a Rope
• The Surprise Examination
• Antigravity Cone
• Mathematical Jokes 2
• Why Gauss Became a Mathematician
• What Shape is a Crescent Moon?
• Famous Mathematicians
• What is a Mersenne Prime?
• The Goldbach Conjecture
• Turtles All the Way Down
• Hilbert’s Hotel
• Continuum Coaches
• A Puzzling Dissection
• A Really Puzzling Dissection
• Nothing Up My Sleeve . . .
• Nothing Down My Leg . . .
• Two Perpendiculars
• Can You Hear the Shape of a Drum?
• What is e, and Why?
• May Husband and Ay . . .
• Many Knees, Many Seats
• Euler’s Formula
• What Day is It?
• Strictly Logical
• Logical or Not?
• A Question of Breeding
• Fair Shares
• The Sixth Deadly Sin
• Weird Arithmetic
• How Deep is the Well?
• McMahon’s Squares
• What is the Square Root of Minus One?
• The Most Beautiful Formula
• Why is Euler’s Beautiful Formula True?
• Your Call May be Monitored for Training Purposes
• Archimedes, You Old Fraud!
• Fractals – The Geometry of Nature
• The Missing Symbol
• Where There’s a Wall, There’s a Way
• Constants to 50 Places
• Richard’s Paradox
• Connecting Utilities
• Are Hard Problems Easy? or How to Win a Million Dollars by Proving the Obvious
• Don’t Get the Goat
• All Triangles are Isosceles
• Square Year
• Gödel’s Theorems
• If π isn’t a Fraction, How Can You Calculate It?
• Infinite Wealth
• Let Fate Decide
• How Many—
• What Shape is a Rainbow?
• Alien Abduction
• The Riemann Hypothesis
• Anti-Atheism
• Disproof of the Riemann Hypothesis
• Murder in the Park
• The Cube of Cheese
• The Game of Life
• Two-Horse Race
• Drawing an Ellipse – and More?
• Mathematical Jokes 3
• The Kepler Problem
• The Milk Crate Problem
• Equal Rights
• Road Network
• Tautoverbs
• Complexity Science
• Scrabble Oddity
• Dragon Curve
• Counterflip
• Spherical Sliced Bread
• Mathematical Theology
• Professor Stewart’s Cunning Crib Sheet