Stewart's Cabinet of Fun Facts and Games

                At first I thought that Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities will be dealing with different theories and analyses about mathematics. I hesitated to read the book because I don’t want to read more information about math, the four books that were already reviewed are already enough to make my head baffle but I was wrong, this book was full of fun games that Stewart filed in his notebooks.

                It is true those school maths are not interesting, the fun is not taught in school. This book had games and answers were also given at the latter pages. Stewart’s cabinet reveals hidden charms of logic, geometry and probability. There was a game in the book where you are asked how to extract a cherry from a cocktail glass. In the book, four toothpicks stood as the cocktail glass, you should only move two toothpicks to extract the cherry, after a few minutes of staring on the figure I decided to see the answer and it was just so easy. In this book, the reason why we can’t divide anything by zero was also revealed. The ideas behind the games were already the keys to Fermat’s last theorem, Poincare conjecture, chaos theory and the million dollars problem, P=NP. There were three mathematical jokes in the book but it was a little bit hard to comprehend, maybe I'm not in to mathematics.

                I have observed that some phrases and games that were taught by our professor in class came from Professor’s Stewart cabinet. It was a good thing that our professor used them because for me, I find it fun and it is unforgettable. It is a good strategy to use humor or games in teaching mathematics so that it will not be dreary and students will interact with their mentor. If this strategy was used in grade school, maybe students today will not loathe mathematics and will learn to love it.