Friday, March 21, 2014

On Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities Ian Stewart





The book was indeed a cabinet itself. It was filled with robes of  mathematical problems piled using interesting short dialogues between  fictional characters with funny or peculiar-sounding names and certain practical  situations that looked as simple as a Pongee cloth but actually complex as silk.

One of my favorite  garments was the deck- of -cards. I was confident that I can figure it out in less than a minute.  Five, ten minutes passed. I was hopeless. But I did not give up. I tried again.  I had no future in this.  I skimmed through the problems and found myself enjoying the short stories rather than doing what I can to solve what was  needed to be solved. That’s the reason why I did not take up a math degree.

 Anyway, math enthusiasts, in reading every page,  perhaps  buried themselves in the caves built by their burning passion for numbers, seeking the unknown and making sense of everything known—eyes glued on the hints and hands writing down solutions dictated by the brain in extreme excitement.


To some , the book was just an easy game to be played, to others a painless suicide. Either way,  there was this probable  guarantee that everyone who had read this may not think and/ or see things the way they used to before. For he and she had learned that everything does not deal with what was superficial alone, and that one must have more than a pair of clear spectacles to discern any or  every possible connections and fitting arguments to obtain an answer and prove its validity.




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