Anneli Lax New Mathematical Library – serie

What does style mean in mathematics? Style is both how one does something and how one communicates what was done. In this book, the author investigates the worlds of the well-known numbers, the binomial coefficients. The author follows the example of RaymondQueneau’s Exercises in Style. Offering the reader 99 stories in various styles. The book celebrates the joy of mathematics and the joy of writing mathematics by exploring the rich properties of this familiar collection of numbers. For any one interested in mathematics, from high school students on up.

Portal through Mathematics is a collection of puzzles and problems mostly on topics relating to secondary mathematics. The problems and topics are fresh and interesting and frequently surprising. One example: the puzzle that asks how much length must be added to a belt around the Earth's equator to raise it one foot has probably achieved old chestnut status. Ivanov, after explaining the surprising answer to this question, goes a step further and asks, if you grabbed that too long belt at some point and raised it as high as possible, how high would that be? The answer to that is more surprising than the classic puzzle's answer. The book is organized into 29 themes, each a topic from algebra, geometry or calculus and each launched from an opening puzzle or problem. There are excursions into number theory, solid geometry, physics and combinatorics. Always there is an emphasis on surprise and delight. And every theme begins at a level approachable with minimal background requirements. With well over 250 puzzles and problems, there is something here sure to appeal to everyone.Portal through Mathematics will be useful for prospective secondary teachers of mathematics and may be used (as a supplementary resource) in university courses in algebra, geometry, calculus, and discrete mathematics. It can also be used for professional development for teachers looking for inspiration. However, the intended audience is much broader. Every fan of mathematics will find enjoyment in it.

The Contest Problem Book VI contains 180 challenging problems from the six years of the American High School Mathematics Examinations (AHSME), 1989 through 1994, as well as a selection of other problems. A Problems Index classifies the 180 problems in the book into subject areas: algebra, complex numbers, discrete mathematics, number theory, statistics, and trigonometry.

This book offers a gentle introduction to Hex, the classic board game created by Piet Hein and popularized by John Nash and Martin Gardner. The first three chapters cover rules, basic strategy, and history. The remaining eight chapters cover a variety of topics: mathematical properties (there are no draws, the first player can win, the acute corner is a losing first move), the related game of Y, winning strategies for small boards, how computers play Hex, an analysis of Random-Move Hex (where one or both players move randomly) and Dark Hex (the imperfect information version of the game, where you can't see your opponent's moves). Did we mention puzzles? There are puzzles in every chapter, with solutions.This book is intended for anyone interested in playing board games or learning some recreational mathematics. It is written for a wide audience and will be enjoyed equally by general readers and professional mathematicians. The book could be used as a textbook or companion resource for a topics course on recreational mathematics or game theory or as a source for undergraduate research questions.

Among the many beautiful and nontrivial theorems in geometry found in Geometry Revisited are the theorems of Ceva, Menelaus, Pappus, Desargues, Pascal, and Brianchon. A nice proof is given of Morley's remarkable theorem on angle trisectors. The transformational point of view is emphasized: reflections, rotations, translations, similarities, inversions, and affine and projective transformations. Many fascinating properties of circles, triangles, quadrilaterals, and conics are developed.

But when I turned the handle on the door, suddenly the buzzing went crazy. I slapped my hands over my ears, when I should have jerked the door shut. It flew open, and I was face-to-face with the Weierstrass function. It was the ugliest function I could imagine, with kinks, and kinks on kinks and kinks on those. And it was shrieking in its buzz-like way, vibrating all over like a plucked string. I stood there, frozen for just a second, and then I was sprinting after the others, with the wild frantic buzzing right behind me.''From the twisted imagination of best-selling author Colin Adams (Zombies & Calculus, The Knot Book) comes this tale of sixteen-year-old Kallie trying to escape death at the hands of the exhibits in a mathematics museum. Kallie crosses paths with Carl Gauss, Bertrand Russell, Sophie Germain, G. H. Hardy, and John von Neumann, as she tries to save herself, her dad, and his colleague Maria from the deadly Hairy Ball theorem, the harrowing Hilbert Hotel, the bisecting Ham Sandwich machine, and a variety of other mathematical menaces. It's a wild romp through a mathematical bestiary featuring the bizarre, the exotic, and the counterintuitive. You'll never think of math the same way again.

This book is an introduction to mathematical game theory, which might better be called the mathematical theory of conflict and cooperation. It is applicable whenever two individuals--or companies, or political parties, or nations--confront situations where the outcome for each depends on the behavior of all. What are the best strategies in such situations? If there are chances of cooperation, with whom should you cooperate, and how should you share the proceeds of cooperation? Since its creation by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944, game theory has shed new light on business, politics, economics, social psychology, philosophy, and evolutionary biology. In this book, its fundamental ideas are developed with mathematics at the level of high school algebra and applied to many of these fields (see the table of contents). Ideas like ""fairness'' are presented via axioms that fair allocations should satisfy; thus the reader is introduced to axiomatic thinking as well as to mathematical modeling of actual situations.

Together with its clear mathematical exposition, the problems in this book take the reader from an introduction to discrete geometry all the way to its frontiers. Investigations start with easily drawn figures, such as dividing a polygon into triangles or finding the minimum number of ""guards"" for a polygon (""art gallery"" problem). These early explorations build intuition and set the stage. Variations on the initial problems stretch this intuition in new directions. These variations on problems together with growing intuition and understanding illustrate the theme of this book: ""When you have answered the question, it is time to question the answer."" Numerous drawings, informal explanations, and careful reasoning build on high school algebra and geometry.