Behind the Magic Trick

Save the best for last! Ian Stewart yet wrote another book that is fun, enjoyable and with attempt to make the readers fall in love with math.  This time he compiled tricks, problems, puzzles, brainteasers, facts and jokes which he calls “curiosities” in a notebook he’s been keeping since he was a kid.

I would have to admit that most of the problems I did not get to solve, and some I just skipped. And that it was getting tedious going back and forth the answers page. Solving it correctly is a very rare case, in which instances I’d find myself ridiculously happy. My favourite one was the sliced fingers. It took me an awful lot of tries that when I finally got it, I didn’t want the string removed from my hands! I just understood topology a tiny bit more than I used to a few moments before I read the book.

Not everything is new. Stewart also tackled about the classics such as the Fibonacci numbers, why we can’t divide anything by zero, the sausage conjecture. All of these concepts I have heard before, but not as well explained as it was in this book.

There was also something about the way it was written that would make the reader find the enigma interesting.  Like how the Great Whodunni and Grumpelina are more palatable starting points than A and B. seems completely random and unrelated, but they sure are otherwise. Also, the entries are usually short (except for that global warming part) which captures my short attention span quite well.  Somehow because of this, the information is reduced to bite-size that makes it easier to digest.

In totality I find the book like watching a magician perform a trick and then he tells you how it’s done afterwards (something that doesn’t happen everyday, does it?). The author has that writing aura that makes the reader feel like he’s just a friend telling a story, not a professor trying to teach math. I may not have developed the love for math like the author did, but I just started to realize how interesting it could be outside the math I’ve always known, the one with often inexplicably hard structure with strings attached to grades.