The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth

"The Library of Babel" is arguably Jorge Luis Borges' best known story-memorialized along with Borges on an Argentine postage stamp. Now, in The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel, William Goldbloom Bloch takes readers on a fascinating tour of the mathematical ideas hidden within one of the classic works of modern literature. Written in the vein of Douglas R. Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning G?del, Escher, Bach, this origin...

What is mathematics? An elementary approach to ideas and methods / by Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins. — 2nd ed. / revised by Ian Siewart., Oxford University Press., New-York, 1996. Written for beginners and scholars, for students and teachers, for philosophers and engineers, What is Mathematics? is a sparkling collection of mathematical gems that offers an entertaining and accessible portrait of (he mathematical world. Brought up to date wit...

First published in 1986, this mind-boggling and entertaining dictionary, arranged in order of magnitude, exposes the fascinating facts about certain numbers and number sequences - very large primes, amicable numbers and golden squares to give but a few examples.

@ 1989, 1997 by W. H. Freeman, New York The Mathematical Association of America (Incorporated) ISBN 0-88385-521-6 Preface Penrose Tiling I Penrose Tiling II Mandelbrot's Fractals Conway's Surreal numbers Back from the Klondike and Other Problems The Oulipo The Oulipo II Wythoff's Nim Pool-Ball Triangles and Other Problems Mathematical Induction and Colored Hats Negative Numbers Cutting Shapes into N Congruent Putts Trapdoor ciphers Trapdoor ciph...

Springer, 2011. - 151 pages. Imagine that you’ve finally found a parking space after a long and harrowing search, but are now encountering some difficulty in trying to enter this space. Wouldn’t it be great if you knew a formula that allowed you to enter the space without difficulty? Are you annoyed because your soda can doesn’t remain upright during a picnic? Would you like to know why a mirror swaps right and left, but not top and bottom? Are...

Oxford University Press, 2004. - 336 pages. Robert Kaplan's The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero was an international best-seller, translated into eight languages. The Times called it "elegant, discursive, and littered with quotes and allusions from Aquinas via Gershwin to Woolf" and The Philadelphia Inquirer praised it as "absolutely scintillating. " In this delightful new book, Robert Kaplan, writing together with his wife Ellen Kap...

Mir Publishers Moscow, 1984. - 360 pages. "In the chapters that follow I will attempt to tell the story of mathematics and weave into an integral whole the various discussions I have had with my non-mathematical friends. This will be a story of mathematics in popular language so that the non-mathematician will see what it is all about. This is not a course in mathematics but merely a series of sketches concerning ideas and methods. There will...

Paul Dry Books, 2007. - 359 pages Infinity, another delightful mathematics book from the creators of The Education of T.C. MITS, offers an entertaining, yet thorough, explanation of the concept of, yes, infinity. Accessible to non-mathematicians, this book also cleverly connects mathematical reasoning to larger issues in society. The new foreword by Harvard mathematics professor Barry Mazur is a tribute to the Liebers’ influence on generations o...

Prometheus Books, 2009. - 269 Pages. What are the odds of finding two people who share the same birth date in a room of thirty-five? Most people would guess they're pretty low. In actuality, the probability is better than 80 percent. This is just one of many entertaining examples of mathematical curiosities presented in this book. If you have been waiting for a book that will evoke the delight and intrigue that mathematics has to offer, this is...

Wiley, 1997. - 141 pages. A lighthearted tour through 49 of the most interesting and useful mathematical formulas ever derived Now in paperback, this whimsical book reacquaints the reader with the pleasure of playing with numbers. Both entertaining and practical, it reaches a level of sophistication consistently high enough to make intelligent people think, but never aims so high that it is difficult to follow. Accompanying the formulas are ov...