School maths is not the interesting part. The real fun is elsewhere. Like a magpie, Ian Stewart has collected the most enlightening, entertaining and vexing 'curiosities' of maths over the years...Now, the private collection is displayed in his cabinet.
There are some hidden gems of logic, geometry and probability - like how to extract a cherry from a cocktail glass (harder than you think), a pop up dodecahedron, the real reason why you can't divide anything by zero and some tips for making money by proving the obvious. Scattered among these are keys to unlocking the mysteries of Fermat's last theorem, the Poincaré Conjecture, chaos theory, and the P/NP problem for which a million dollar prize is on offer. There are beguiling secrets about familiar names like Pythagoras or prime numbers, as well as anecdotes about great mathematicians. Pull out the drawers of the Professor's cabinet and who knows what could happen.
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[When I was fourteen years old, I started a notebook]***
(Profile Books, 3 September 2010, first published 2008, ebook, 322 pages, Around the Year in 52 Books 2019, a book related to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), borrowed from @GlasgowLib via @OverDriveLibs)
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This book is not what I expected at all. I thought it would be a fun, entertaining read about mathematical curiosities. This is the case with some of the anecdotes in this book. However, there are many puzzles that don't have the solution. Some of these are quite complex and I didn't fully understand them. It would have been better if the solutions had been included. This is aimed at mathematical and non-mathematical people alike after all. It's not the best book to read straight through as I found it very dull at times. Very disappointing.
