mathematics

Traces the history of the one-hundred-year quest to solve a mathematical mystery first posed by Jules Henri Poincar? and eventually solved in 2003 by Grigori Perelman, a reclusive young Russian.

Profiles ten notable individuals in the field of mathematics, discussing their research, accomplishments, ethical and professional obstacles, and contributions. Includes photographs, illustrations, chronology of notable events, and a list of resources.

Presents sixteen short stories involving mathematics, including tales in which a nineteenth-century woman mathematician is murdered, a nursing home resident explains how he disproved Goldbach's conjecture in college, and Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell discovers electromagnetic waves.

Presents an overview of the major thinkers in mathematics and their works, from Euclid and Newton to Boole and Turing.

Contains over eighteen hundred alphabetically-arranged, math-related entries that cover things like unsolved theorems, challenging puzzles and games, discussions on the search for a fourth dimension, parallel universes, as well as profiles of noted mathematicians.

Presenting mathematical ideas of peoples from a variety of small-scale and traditional cultures, this book humanizes our view of mathematics and expands our conception of what is mathematical. Through engaging examples of how particular societies structure time, reach decisions about the future, make models and maps, systematize relationships, and create intriguing figures, Marcia Ascher demonstrates that traditional cultures have mathematical ideas that are far more substantial and sophisticated than is generally acknowledged. Malagasy divination rituals, for example, rely on complex algebraic algorithms. And some cultures use calendars far more abstract and elegant than our own. Ascher also shows that certain concepts assumed to be universal--that time is a single progression, for instance, or that equality is a static relationship--are not. The Basque notion of equivalence, for example, is a dynamic and temporal one not adequately captured by the familiar equal sign. Other ideas taken to be the exclusive province of professionally trained Western mathematicians are, in fact, shared by people in many societies. The ideas discussed come from geographically varied cultures, including the Borana and Malagasy of Africa, the Tongans and Marshall Islanders of Oceania, the Tamil of South India, the Basques of Western Europe, and the Balinese and Kodi of Indonesia.

Mr. Ruche finds himself involved in a bizarre series of events when he inherits a vast mathematical library from a long-lost friend in the Amazon and the little boy whose family Mr. Ruche lives with discovers a parrot with an astounding knowledge of math.

A mathematical novel in which young Victoria Line of Flatland discovers her great-great-grandfather's diary in an attic and is plunged into an adventure through ten dimensions, guided by the Space Hopper.

Describes the historical developments of Fermat's last theorem from the ancient Egyptians in 3000 BC to 1995 and the proving of the theorem by mathematician Andrew Wiles.