Odd Titles
At the recent Northwest Mathematics Conference in Portland (OR), I gave a talk on the oddest things I know about in mathematics. As a brief part of that talk, I shared a listing of texts that portray contrasting images of mathematics to the public (i.e. someone who happens to wander past the mathematics shelf in a bookstore).
After my session, several people asked for a list of the book titles...one person said I should share the list via this web site. This sounded like a good idea (and use of this web site), so here goes:
- Carl Linderholm's Mathematics Made Difficult
- August DeMorgan's The Encyclopedia of Eccentrics
- Clifford Pickover's A Passion for Mathematics: Numbers, Puzzles, Madness, Religion, and the Quest for Reality
- Jon Scieszka's Math Curse
- Edward Burger and Michael Starbird's Coincidences, Chaose, and All That Math Jazz
- Rudy Rucker's The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul
- Scott Buchanan's Poetry and Mathematics
- Peter Cryle's Geometry in the Boudoir: Configurations of French Erotic Narrative
- David Wells's The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry
- John Paulos'Mathematics and Humor
- William Frucht's (ed) Imaginary Numbers: An Anthology of Marvelous Mathematical stories, Diversions, Poems, and Musings
- Boyd Henry's Every Number is Special
- David Wells' The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers
- Eli Maor's To Infinity and Beyond
- Mario Livio's The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, The World's Most Astonishing Number
- Robert Kaplan's The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero
- Eli Maor's e: The Story of a Number
- Jonathan Borwein and Peter Borwein's Pi: A Source Book
- Paul Nahin's An Imaginary Tale: The Story of SQRT(-1)
- Julian Havil's Gamma: Exploring Euler's Constant
There are so many more books such as those listed. In future weeks in this section, I will include reviews of numerous books such as those above. If you need additional information regarding any of the above books, please contact me through this web site.
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