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Full Description
This annual anthology brings together the year's finest mathematics writing from around the world. Featuring promising new voices alongside some of the foremost names in the field, The Best Writing on Mathematics 2014 makes available to a wide audience many articles not easily found anywhere else--and you don't need to be a mathematician to enjoy them. These writings offer surprising insights into the nature, meaning, and practice of mathematics today. They delve into the history, philosophy, teaching, and everyday occurrences of math, and take readers behind the scenes of today's hottest mathematical debates. Here John Conway presents examples of arithmetical statements that are almost certainly true but likely unprovable; Carlo Sequin explores, compares, and illustrates distinct types of one-sided surfaces known as Klein bottles; Keith Devlin asks what makes a video game good for learning mathematics and shows why many games fall short of that goal; Jordan Ellenberg reports on a recent breakthrough in the study of prime numbers; Stephen Pollard argues that mathematical practice, thinking, and experience transcend the utilitarian value of mathematics; and much, much more.
In addition to presenting the year's most memorable writings on mathematics, this must-have anthology includes an introduction by editor Mircea Pitici. This book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in where math has taken us--and where it is headed.
Contents
Introduction, Mircea Pitici ix Mathematics and the Good Life, Stephen Pollard 1 The Rise of Big Data: How It's Changing the Way We Think about the World, Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger 20 Conway's Wizards, Tanya Khovanova 33 On Unsettleable Arithmetical Problems, John H. Conway 39 Color illustration section follows page 48 Crinkly Curves, Brian Hayes 49 Why Do We Perceive Logarithmically? Lav R. Varshney and John Z. Sun 64 The Music of Math Games, Keith Devlin 74 The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra for Artists, Bahman Kalantari and Bruce Torrence 87 The Arts-Digitized, Quantified, and Analyzed, Nicole Lazar 96 On the Number of Klein Bottle Types, Carlo H. Sequin 105 Adventures in Mathematical Knitting, Sarah-Marie Belcastro 128 The Mathematics of Fountain Design: A Multiple-Centers Activity, Marshall Gordon 144 Food for (Mathematical) Thought, Penelope Dunham 156 Wondering about Wonder in Mathematics, Dov Zazkis and Rina Zazkis 165 The Lesson of Grace in Teaching, Francis Edward Su 188 Generic Proving: Reflections on Scope and Method, Uri Leron and Orit Zaslavsky 198 Extreme Proofs I: The Irrationality of 2, John H. Conway and Joseph Shipman 216 Stuck in the Middle: Cauchy's Intermediate Value Theorem and the History of Analytic Rigor, Michael J. Barany 228 Plato, Poincare, and the Enchanted Dodecahedron: Is the Universe Shaped Like the Poincare Homology Sphere? Lawrence Brenton 239 Computing with Real Numbers, from Archimedes to Turing and Beyond, Mark Braverman 251 Chaos at Fifty, Adilson E. Motter and David K. Campbell 270 Twenty-Five Analogies for Explaining Statistical Concepts, Roberto Behar, Pere Grima, and Lluis Marco-Almagro 288 College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage, David Gale and Lloyd S. Shapley 299 The Beauty of Bounded Gaps, Jordan Ellenberg 308 Contributors 315 Notable Writings 325 Acknowledgments 333 Credits 335
