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A Passion for Mathematics: Numbers, Puzzles, Madness, Religion, and the Quest for Reality by Clifford A. Pickover |
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A perpetual idea machine, Clifford Pickover is one of the most creative, original thinkers in the world today. Journal of Recreational Mathematics Pickover just seems to exist in more dimensions than the rest of us. -- Ian Stewart Scientific American Clifford Pickover is many things--scientist, scholar, author, editor, and visionary... Games It is a safe bet to conjecture that this is the best recreational mathematics book that will be published in this year... Pickover writes with his usual style and straightforward simplicity in this book. The material is presented well and can be understood by anyone with a basic middle school mathematics background. This is a cool book! -- Charles Ashbacker Journal of Recreational Mathematics Through accessible and readable prose and through detailed, highquality line illustrations, Pickover ably transports the general reader from culturally embedded traditional topics to a new and surprising frontier. -- Harold Don Allen Mathematics Teacher Pickover writes about his subject with contagious enthusiasm and comprehensive erudition. Choice A splendid recreational book... An extremely alluring page-turner. -- Andrew Bremner Notices of the American Mathematical Society
Product Description
Humanity's love affair with mathematics and mysticism reached a critical juncture, legend has it, on the back of a turtle in ancient China. As Clifford Pickover briefly recounts in this book, a comprehensive one on magic squares, Emperor Yu was supposedly strolling along the Yellow River one day around 2200 BC when he spotted the creature: its shell had a series of dots within squares. To Yu's amazement, each row of squares contained 15 dots, as did the columns and diagonals. When he added any two cells opposite along a line through the centre square, like 2 and 8, he always arrived at ten. The turtle, unwitting inspirer of the "Yu" square, went on to a life of courtly comfort and fame. Pickover explains why Chinese emperors, Babylonian astrologer-priests, prehistoric cave people in France, and ancient Mayans of the Yucatan were convinced that magic squares - arrays filled with numbers or letters in certain arrangements - held the secret of the universe. Since the dawn of civilization, he writes, humans have invoked such patterns to ward off evil and bring good fortune. Yet who would have guessed that in the 21st century, mathematicians would be studying magic squares so immense and in so many dimenstions that the objects defy ordinary human contemplation and visualization? Readers are treated to a colourful history of magic squares and similar structures, their construction, and classification along with a remarkable variety of newly discovered objects ranging from ornate inlaid magic cubes to hypercubes. Illustrated examples occur throughout, with some patterns from the author's own experiments. The tesseracts, circles, spheres, and stars that he presents perfectly convey the age-old devotion of the math-minded to this Zenlike quest. Number lovers, puzzle aficionados, and math enthusiasts should enjoy this encyclopedia of one of the few areas of mathematics where the contributions of even nonspecialists count.
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A perpetual idea machine, Clifford Pickover is one of the most creative, original thinkers in the world today. Journal of Recreational Mathematics Pickover just seems to exist in more dimensions than the rest of us. -- Ian Stewart Scientific American Clifford Pickover is many things--scientist, scholar, author, editor, and visionary... Games It is a safe bet to conjecture that this is the best recreational mathematics book that will be published in this year... Pickover writes with his usual style and straightforward simplicity in this book. The material is presented well and can be understood by anyone with a basic middle school mathematics background. This is a cool book! -- Charles Ashbacker Journal of Recreational Mathematics Through accessible and readable prose and through detailed, highquality line illustrations, Pickover ably transports the general reader from culturally embedded traditional topics to a new and surprising frontier. -- Harold Don Allen Mathematics Teacher Pickover writes about his subject with contagious enthusiasm and comprehensive erudition. Choice A splendid recreational book... An extremely alluring page-turner. -- Andrew Bremner Notices of the American Mathematical Society
Product Description
Humanity's love affair with mathematics and mysticism reached a critical juncture, legend has it, on the back of a turtle in ancient China. As Clifford Pickover briefly recounts in this book, a comprehensive one on magic squares, Emperor Yu was supposedly strolling along the Yellow River one day around 2200 BC when he spotted the creature: its shell had a series of dots within squares. To Yu's amazement, each row of squares contained 15 dots, as did the columns and diagonals. When he added any two cells opposite along a line through the centre square, like 2 and 8, he always arrived at ten. The turtle, unwitting inspirer of the "Yu" square, went on to a life of courtly comfort and fame. Pickover explains why Chinese emperors, Babylonian astrologer-priests, prehistoric cave people in France, and ancient Mayans of the Yucatan were convinced that magic squares - arrays filled with numbers or letters in certain arrangements - held the secret of the universe. Since the dawn of civilization, he writes, humans have invoked such patterns to ward off evil and bring good fortune. Yet who would have guessed that in the 21st century, mathematicians would be studying magic squares so immense and in so many dimenstions that the objects defy ordinary human contemplation and visualization? Readers are treated to a colourful history of magic squares and similar structures, their construction, and classification along with a remarkable variety of newly discovered objects ranging from ornate inlaid magic cubes to hypercubes. Illustrated examples occur throughout, with some patterns from the author's own experiments. The tesseracts, circles, spheres, and stars that he presents perfectly convey the age-old devotion of the math-minded to this Zenlike quest. Number lovers, puzzle aficionados, and math enthusiasts should enjoy this encyclopedia of one of the few areas of mathematics where the contributions of even nonspecialists count.
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence
When you gaze at magic squares with their amazing properties and hidden symmetries, it's sometimes difficult to believe that there are easy-to-remember ways to construct many of them using simple rules. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
When you gaze at magic squares with their amazing properties and hidden symmetries, it's sometimes difficult to believe that there are easy-to-remember ways to construct many of them using simple rules. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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