“Wherein the discerning or desperate reader may locate answers to those questions that are currently known to possess them...with occasional supplementary facts for their further edification.”
This statement by Mr. Stewart made this book really interesting. Not just interesting but also all the more appealing to the teenage readers. This statement also describes the book in totality. The book provided puzzles, tricky games and problems, not-so-funny mathematical jokes and some tidbits in accordance to different theorems proposed by great mathematicians. His way of presenting the ideas and principles behind each theorem or conjunctures made this book reader-friendly. He discussed and traced the history of things related to mathematics in a way that can be understood easily. With this book, we can be able to decipher how Mr. Stewart really felt about Mathematics during his childhood and present days. Compiling those problems and puzzles really showed his great and unmeasurable dedication for numbers and theorems which revolve happily around the subject of mathematics.
Fibonacci, Fermat, Gōdel, Euler and many more famous mathematicians were mentioned in his book. Some were accompanied with histories, facts and even jokes. The seven bridges of Königsberg (finding a path through the city that includes each bridge only once) and the sausage conjecture (wrapping circles or spheres efficiently) captured my total attention. The river-crossing problems also fascinated me. It really got me thinking on how to transport each load without a single load being eaten or harmed by the other.
Some of the entries were somehow familiar to me. And such include the ‘Extracting the Cherry’ wherein only 2 sticks are allowed to be moved when extracting the cherry from the glass (made-up of 4 sticks), and the ‘Empty Glasses’ in which 5 glasses are to be arranged in an alternate manner (full, empty, full, empty, full) and that only 1 glass is to be moved. This is a tricky yet a very simple one. You just have to pour the contents of a glass to another one leaving it empty and the other full.
Creating amazing mathematics-based arts were also mentioned and illustrated in his book. He provided the steps on how to make these arts like for example creating a pop-up dodecahedron or an antigravity cone or forming a pentagon from a rectangular piece of paper.
Hypotheses, theories, and works of famous mathematicians were also discussed by Mr. Stewart. One of which is the famous Chaos theory. Chaos theory was the name given by the media when a new discovery in dynamical systems theory existed. It says that the “the mathematics of the systems change over time according to specific rules.
The very famous Riemann Hypothesis was also tackled in this book. The Riemann Hypothesis that makes every single mathematician in this very planet dream of proving. Proving this very difficult hypothesis makes an ordinary mathematician turn into an extraordinary one, being able to experience fame and richness. This hypothesis is important to be proven because “it has a lot of far-reaching analogues and generalizations in algebraic number theory. Thus, if this hypothesis can be proved in its original form, then so can the generalizations.”
Some of the problems and situations in the book are skippable while some ignites interest in the brain. The problem associated with the four-color theorem bores me. Even though the problem was tackled by many mathematicians and extensive studying were done, still bores me to read the history or even color a map. And also the stuff related to the value of pi. But unlike those kind of entries, some entries really captivated my student interest. Like for example, performing those curious calculations in the book and testing another set of numbers and really see if the same principle works with another set of numbers. Some of the mind and soul-boggling entries also fascinated me; the Numerical Spell and the Spelling Mistakes entries. For the spelling mistakes, a sentence was to be distinguished if it’s a true or a false. But, if the sentence is true, then it has to be false and if it’s false, it has to be true...really confusing.
Another interesting part of the book is how the titles of each entries are constructed, and how some of those titles vibrate irony as well as fun. Some of the titles possess the ability to generate curiosity. Some would just leave you thinking on what answers are behind those tricky titles. Some of these titles are ‘The Sphinx is a Reptile’, ‘Much Undo About Knotting’, ‘A Constant Bore’, ‘Ring a-Ring a-Ring road’, ‘How Old was Diophantus?’, and ‘Why Can’t I divide Zero?’.
The book was made possible without even building a story which incorporates moral lessons and such. Instead, he incorporated situations which require mathematical logics, equations and computations. As I was going through with this book, several emotions surfaced at each situations he stated. These feelings include positive ones like amazement and delight (given that I completely understood the situation), and negative ones like feeling guilty for exhibiting a slow response to a mathematical challenge. This book also proved me that curiosity could really kill a cat. Made me extract my calculator and pen to try if a solution really existed behind each problem. Another thing, maybe out of his 3 mathematical jokes only 1 made me laugh (not much but still). Haha. It’s the joke mentioning 2 mathematicians and a waitress in a diner. It’s just funny. In totality, I really loved and enjoyed reading this book. I bow down to Mr. Ian Stewart.
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