The Best Writing on Mathematics 2017

Mircea Pitici

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780691178639
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400888559
• Topic: Mathematics
• Subtopic: Mathematics General
• Index: Mathematics

The year's finest mathematics writing from around the world

This annual anthology brings together the year's finest mathematics writing from around the world. Featuring promising new voices alongside some of the foremost names in the field, The Best Writing on Mathematics 2017 makes available to a wide audience many articles not easily found anywhere else—and you don't need to be a mathematician to enjoy them. These writings offer surprising insights into the nature, meaning, and practice of mathematics today. They delve into the history, philosophy, teaching, and everyday occurrences of math, and take readers behind the scenes of today's hottest mathematical debates.

Here Evelyn Lamb describes the excitement of searching for incomprehensibly large prime numbers, Jeremy Gray speculates about who would have won math's highest prize—the Fields Medal—in the nineteenth century, and Philip Davis looks at mathematical results and artifacts from a business and marketing viewpoint. In other essays, Noson Yanofsky explores the inherent limits of knowledge in mathematical thinking, Jo Boaler and Lang Chen reveal why finger-counting enhances children's receptivity to mathematical ideas, and Carlo Séquin and Raymond Shiau attempt to discover how the Renaissance painter Fra Luca Pacioli managed to convincingly depict his famous rhombicuboctahedron, a twenty-six-sided Archimedean solid. And there's much, much more.

In addition to presenting the year's most memorable writings on mathematics, this must-have anthology includes a bibliography of other notable writings and an introduction by the editor, Mircea Pitici. This book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in where math has taken us—and where it is headed.

Table of contents

• Cover
• The BEST WRITING on MATHEMATICS 2017
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Mathematical Products
• The Largest Known Prime Number
• A Unified Theory of Randomness
• An “Infinitely Rich” Mathematician Turns 100
• Inverse Yogiisms
• Ramanujan in Bronze
• Creating Symmetric Fractals
• Projective Geometry in the Moon Tilt Illusion
• Girih for Domes: Analysis of Three Iranian Domes
• Why Kids Should Use Their Fingers in Math Class
• Threshold Concepts and Undergraduate Mathematics Teaching
• Rising above a Cause-and-Effect Stance in Mathematics Education Research
• How to Find the Logarithm of Any Number Using Nothing but a Piece of String
• Rendering Pacioli’s Rhombicuboctahedron
• Who Would Have Won the Fields Medal 150 Years Ago?
• Paradoxes, Contradictions, and the Limits of Science
• Stairway to Heaven: The Abstract Method and Levels of Abstraction in Mathematics
• Are Our Brains Bayesian?
• Great Expectations: The Past, Present, and Future of Prediction
• Contributors
• Notable Writings
• Acknowledgments
• Credits