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