The Cabinet

When he was fourteen, Ian Stewart’s, one of the best known mathematicians alive, started a maths notebook. Like a magpie he collected every interesting thing he could find out about the maths that wasn’t taught at school. His notebook became six, then spilled into Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities. Open its drawers and discover a fabulous lifetime collection of games, puzzles, stories, jokes and factoids, odd items of mathematical culture, card tricks, things to make and things to do. You will find out why the M25 is shorter anticlockwise than clockwise, and what the deal is with Fermat’s last theorem, chaos theory, fractals and Penrose patterns – and the real reason you can’t divide anything by zero. Ian Stewart has spent years filling his cabinet with intriguing mathematical games, puzzles, stories, and factoids intended for the adventurous mind. If you enjoy interesting puzzles, dorky humor, and mathematical trivia, you will probably like this book said by another blogger which I've scanned a little while ago.

 Actually, my mind is so blank, that writing this review will took me several hours to finish, but even long to finish, i'm pretty sure that the result will not be lengthy. I just don't know how and what will I write. Well, in my own opinion, this book is fascinating, but a little dragging, because for me, games, puzzles and the like don't have to be complex, I mean, things like this are made to entertain us not make our lives somehow complicated. I'm honestly not pretty sure with all this stuff I’m saying, it’s just a pure opinion that I, myself, is not that certain.

 This book contain servings of nourishing bits of intellectual history: Fibonacci series, Fermat's last theorem, chaos theory, the four color problem, what Byron wrote about Newton, Euler's conjecture, public key cryptography, the inventor of the equals sign, Zeno's paradox, how the Babylonians handled number, the probability theory of monkeys and typewriters, the square root of minus one, celestial resonance and how the Egyptians did fractions with hieroglyphs.