Curiosity Filled the Cabinet

“I incline to the view that a miscellany should be miscellaneous, and this one is,” Stewart notes in his introduction of Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities.

Ian Stewart believed that the most interesting part of math cannot be taught inside the four walls of the classroom. Rather, the most fun part can be discovered elsewhere. Knowing this, he collected his ‘curiosities’ and piled them up in his cabinet. Amazing. I can’t even use up the pages of my own math notebook yet he filled up a whole cabinet.

His curiosities included mindboggling yet entertaining applications of math like puzzles, geometry, chaos theory, and keys to Fermat’s Last Theorem. He even offered steps on how to make a pop-up dodecahedron. Interestingly enough, he even explained why numbers can’t be divided by zero. His cabinet is filled with mathematical enigmas.

I can say that this book was much more bearable than his previous one. There was more interaction with this because it contained puzzles which are sometimes unsolvable but still interesting enough to make you grab a pen and paper. His wardrobe opens up a new world. Not Narnia, but just as magical.