A Cabinet of Mathematical Treasures

What’s inside your cabinet?

Mathematics and I had shared a one-sided love for over the past 17 years. I don’t know how the trend kept going, but honestly I was hoping for a miracle that somehow this one-sided love of mine would finally have a happy ending. Not only to perk my grades high but for the dignity that the most hated subject loved me back. Who won’t be proud and happy for that? And so, I found a way easier.

Recently, I’ve found out that knowing the most exciting math is not taught in school. Why? Because it was found inside the cabinet of Professor Ian Stewart! Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities reveals a world full of intriguing mathematical games, puzzles, anecdotes, jokes and oddities intended for an adventurous mind. Inside, you can relish with some of the most exhilarating stories and factoids from his legendary cabinet. Mine the hidden gems of geometry, probability and logic like there’s no tomorrow. Surely, you never know what enigmas you’ll find in the Stewart cabinet, but they’re guaranteed to be clever, mind-expanding, and delightfully fun.

Reading a book of mathematical games and puzzles can be like reading a famous fiction novel: it’s exciting and a bit addicting. Especially since Stewart has a genius explanation that allows details of the Riemann hypothesis and the Poincare conjecture. Indeed, mathematics has never been more entertaining than this.

The other special thing about this book is that it is not just a typical alternative to the cryptic Sudoku or crossword.  They contain, in snack-sized servings, nourishing bits of intellectual history: Fibonacci series, Fermat’s last theorem, chaos theory, the four color problem, what Byron wrote about Newton, Euler’s conjecture, public key cryptography, the inventor of the equals sign, Zeno’s paradox, how the Babylonians handled number, the probability theory of monkeys and typewriters, the square root of minus one, celestial resonance and how the Egyptians did fractions with hieroglyphs (Radford, 2010).

Knowing all this three-course meal information made me overly amazed at how vast Stewart’s cabinet was. A cabinet full of infinite knowledge and at the same time equipped with a high level of excitement and fun. For sure, you can’t be too much interested to read this amazing book.

Now that I found the easiest road to appreciate math more, I think it’s time to improve my perspective and start enhancing my math “skills”. Learning math is easy but learning in a fun and interesting way is much much more easy and satisfying. To Professor Stewart, thank you for letting me took a sneak peek at your cabinet. It was an awesome experience at its best.