curiosities... curiosity...curious

            I can say that Professor Ian Stewart is really a great author because he had created and published many popular science books which include the one entitled “Mathematics of Life” and this book “Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities”. Professor Stewart is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick and also the mathematics consultant for the New Scientist. He was awarded the Michael Faraday Medal because he was able to further the public understanding of science. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001, and appeared on television and radio frequently. He is doing a research on pattern formation and network dynamics.

School mathematics is an interesting subject but it is not the interesting part of life. The real fun is elsewhere. Professor Ian Stewart has collected the most enlightening, entertaining and vexing ‘curiosities’ of mathematics over the years, like a magpie. Now, the private collection is displayed in his cabinet.

Professor Stewart created this book, wrote the questions and a hodgepodge of other puzzles, paradoxes, brainteasers, tricks, facts, jokes, and others which he called “curiosities”. An example of these is the question: “What positive integer is equal to its own Scrabble score when spelled out in full?” Professor Stewart noted in his introduction: “I incline to the view that a miscellany should be miscellaneous, and this one is,” and in fact, in this statement, he was not lying. There was no real organization to his assortment, making it ideal for dabbling. I can say that some entries in this book is just okay for skipping while the others will really inspire you to get a pencil and a scratch paper.

Professor Stewart revisited the classics: the seven bridges of Königsberg in the riddle/question “Can you find a path through the city that includes each bridge only once?” and the sausage conjecture in “How efficiently can circles or spheres be wrapped?” He also offered originals, describing the steps for creating a pop-up dodecahedron, and illuminating the easiest way for Archimedes to have moved the Earth. He based some of the stories on geometry, the others on logic, probability or on a plain Jane arithmetic.

Some of the gems of logic, geometry and probability – like how to extract a cherry from a cocktail glass, 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, are hidden in this cabinet.

Scattered among these gems are the 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 also secrets about familiar names like Pythagoras or prime numbers, as well as anecdotes about great mathematicians.