Product Description

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…

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #315 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From the Back Cover
What's maths got to do with it? Delve into this curious cabinet to find out for yourself: - How to slice through your fingers without cutting them off - How to deduce without looking whether the rabbit under the hat is black or white - Why the M25 is shorted anti-clockwise than clockwise, and by how much - Why minus times minus equals plus - And how to extract that cherry from a cocktail glass (harder than you think!) Forget sudoku. For keeping your brain limber, nothing can compete with Professor Stewart's tasty assortment of numerical nibbles.

About the Author
Professor Stewart is best known for making Mathematics accessible and popular. He was awarded the Royal SocietyÂ’s Michael Faraday Medal for furthering the public understanding of science. His many popular science books include Does God Play Dice?, LifeÂ’s Other Secrets and Flatterland. He is the mathematics consultant for the New Scientist and is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick. In 2001 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.