Mathematics Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

“One of the virtues of knowing a bit of math is that you can impress the hell out of your friends.”

This quote is probably the coolest that I have ever heard from a mathematical author. Again, Ian Stewart has proved that not all of the curiosities lie beneath the universe: they are just suspended in numbers.

The book A Cabinet of Curiosities has given me a lot of insights about the puzzles that evolve around math: certain mysteries that has not been taught or learned, just analyzed and thought.  Not just the classic puzzles, but the new ones that can really boggle up minds. I am not quite the “thinking” type, but by just reading the book, it will present math’s other side of the coin.

Can you make a pop-up dodecahedron? How can you alternately fill a glass of water? Who tells the truth and lie? How can you extract a cherry from a glass? These are just some of the questions Stewart asked that he presented in the book. And the answers? One word: fascinating.

As the author mention in his introduction, you can skip at any page you like, but it’s more fun to follow the table of contents, for earlier problems are easy to solve than the on the proceeding pages, which as he said, challenging. But I think solving the first problem was quite tricky for me. I am referring to the problem Alien Encounter in which we have to identify the species of the aliens, one being always tells the truth and the other that tells a lie. I first encountered this problem in a math quiz bowl we have attended, but I was wrong about it. Seeing it again another time made me really think. Now I really kind of contemplated and when I flipped on the answer key guide, then again I was wrong. This problem may be not math-related but I assume, and is a fact that logical deductions are indeed of a necessity in the mathematical field.

Another problem presented in this book that I have already encountered is the River Crossing which involves a wolf, a goat and a cabbage. The player is the boatman and needs to carry only one to pass cross the river without the wolf eating the goat or the goat eating the cabbage. This is quite simpler since the wolf does not eat cabbage so the goat will be the first transported followed by either the wolf or cabbage. If one of the two were transported, the goat is carried back to the starting point, and the one being left will be carried back. The boatman returns to get the goat and voila, you solved a problem.

What’s unique about this book? I can say its uniqueness lies on the table of contents. As I skimmed through it, there were many chapters included but when you look at their pages, they are really short. The longest may be two pages at maximum. There are no morale, no story, no love, and no horror. Just mind-boggling g math puzzles, math anecdotes, and the one which I am not quite fond of, math jokes.

There are anecdotes in this book as well as jokes which generally, I don’t get at all. Either that they are so deep or I’m the one shallow individual. Either way, it was a nice thing that the author has mixed it up with this to avoid his readers being bored or tired of solving his golden puzzles. But having them, a kind of say “corny” jokes is a big no-no for me.

Reading the book, I can say that Stewart has offered small bits of math problems which are really a great exercise for the mind instead of serving a full course of x’es and y’s and complicated terminologies, graphs and figures, which I think is a “hooker” for an average, non-mathematician (like me… sssssshhhh….) reader.

This book has given me an idea that not all math problems are a bunch of boring stuffs you can pin a wall and shoot with a shotgun, but enigmas that can be synthesized not by just following a bunch of long, difficult formulae and can be solved in some little ordinary ways. What it needs are three things: interest, willingness and determination. After all, “There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count, and those who can’t.”