In this retitled and revised edition of The Problems of Mathematics, renowned mathematician Ian Stewart gives math buffs and non-technical readers--as well as students of the subject--the perfect guide to today's mathematics. This challenging and fascinating book includes three new chapters that cover the most recent developments in the mathematics field, including one on Kepler's sphere-packing problem, to which a solution has been at last announced after a wait of 380 years.
Stewart, a particularly gifted mathematician and writer, shows us not only that math can be explained in everyday language, but that it can be downright fun as well. Puzzle solvers especially will delight in accounts of puzzles like Fermat's famous theorem, manifolds (a kind of mathematical origami in many dimensions), and the patterns in chaos. And what reader wouldn't want probability theory explained by demonstrating how to maximize one's lottery winnings?
According to From Here to Infinity, good mathematics has an air of economy and an element of surprise. One could easily make the same claim for this instructive, amusing, and sometimes mind-boggling book.
Ian Stewart is Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University in England. His many books include Does God Play Dice?, The collapse of Chaos (with Jack Cohen), Game, Set and Math, and Fearful Symmetry: Is God a Geometer? (with Martin Golubitsky). He contributed to a wide range of newspapers and magazines, and writes the "Mathematical Recreations" column of Scientific American.
