Title: Mathematical Journeys Author(s): Peter D. Schumer Pages: 199 Publisher: Wiley-Interscience; 1 edition Publication date: 2004 Language: English Format: PDF ISBN-10: 0471220663 ISBN-13: Description: A colorful tour through the intriguing world of mathematics
Take a grand tour of the best of modern math, its most elegant solutions, most clever discoveries, most mind-bending propositions, and most impressive personalities. Writing with a light touch while showing the real mathematics, author Peter Schumer introduces you to the history of mathematics, number theory, combinatorics, geometry, graph theory, and "recreational mathematics." Requiring only high school math and a healthy curiosity, Mathematical Journeys helps you explore all those aspects of math that mathematicians themselves find most delightful. You'll discover brilliant, sometimes quirky and humorous tidbits like how to compute the digits of pi, the Josephus problem, mathematical amusements such as Nim and Wythoff's game, pizza slicing, and clever twists on rolling dice.
Review
"This is such a fount of fascinating knowledge and problems that all professors and teachers who want to motivate and challenge their talented students should consult it." (Choice, June 2004, Vol. 41 No. 10)
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Let's Get Cooking: A Variety of Mathematical Ingredients
2 The Green Chicken Contest
3 The Josephus Problem: Please Choose Me Last
4 Nim and Wythoff's Game: Or How to Get Others to Pay Your Bar Bill
5 Mersenne Primes, Perfect Numbers, and Amicable Pairs
6 The Harmonic Series... and Less
7 Fermat Primes, the Chinese Remainder Theorem, and Lattice Points
8 Tic-Tac-Toe, Magic Squares, and Latin Squares
9 Mathematical Variations on Rolling Dice
10 Pizza Slicing, Map Coloring, Pointillism, and Jack-in-the-Box
11 Episodes in the Calculation of Pi
12 A Sextet of Scintillating Problems
13 Primality Testing Below a Quadrillion
14 Erd¨os Number Zero
15 Choosing Stamps to Mail a Letter, Let Me Count the Ways
16 Pascal Potpourri
Appendix: Comments and Solutions to Problems Worth Considering
Bibliography
Index
Title: Mathematical Journeys