Narnia (Ian Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities)

A cabinet is a furniture usually use for storing our clothes, shoes and other things. But here in this book entitled, Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, Professor Ian Stewart gave an extraordinary twist on what’s inside his cabinet.

Knowing that the most exciting math is not taught in school, Professor Ian Stewart has spent years filling his cabinet with intriguing mathematical games, puzzles, stories, and factoids intended for the adventurous mind. The book reveals the most exhilarating oddities from Professor Stewart’s legendary cabinet.

School math 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 math 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.

Stewart can say this with fervor because, as his entertainments confirm, mathematics exposes the reality beneath the facade of reality that most of us are happy with. There are hundreds of these confections and all of them are presented with a fizzy enthusiasm and good humor missing from the gloomy math lessons of my own schooldays.