Afterword by Herbert A. Hauptman, Nobel Laureate
"An enchanting adventure, Mathematical Amazements and Surprises will delight and inform the general reader. You need not be a mathematical scholar to savor the surprises and entertaining insights that this engaging and illuminating book has to offer. Everyone will enjoy reading this book!"
HERBERT A. HAUPTMAN, Nobel Laureate
"This book presents a treasure trove of mathematical wonders - easy to understand and therefore another successful attempt by the author to engender a love for mathematics for the general audience. Yet the many surprises the book presents will also generate a 'wow' from the mathematically sophisticated readers. I highly recommend this book to all."
CHARLOTTE K. FRANK, Ph.D.
Senior Vice President, Research and Development, McGraw-Hill Education,
The McGraw-Hill Companies
“This book provides the reader with a plethora of mathematical nuggets that should turn on even those only ‘luke warm’ to mathematics. It should go a long way to stimulate a love for mathematics that is so needed in education today.”
STANLEY H. KAPLAN
Founder of Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Centers
"A delightful read, even for those of us who couldn't make it through trigonometry"
BOB SIMON, Correspondent, 60 Minutes
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 Mathematical Amazements and Surprises. If you’ve been waiting for a book that will evoke the delight and intrigue that mathematics has to offer, this is the book for you. Math educators Alfred S. Posamentier and Ingmar Lehmann have created the perfect introduction to the wonders of mathematics for the general reader, requiring only a high school background in the subject.
Among the entertaining and useful tricks they teach are shortcuts in arithmetic, such as ways to determine at a glance the exact divisors of any given number. They also demonstrate how the properties of certain numbers can lead to infinite loops. What is particularly exciting is how many correct answers turn out to be counterintuitive. Exploring all these features will instill insights into the nature of numbers, improve your ability to manipulate them, and give you an appreciation for the inherent elegance of mathematics.
Posamentier and Lehmann evoke the beauty of mathematics through the visual aspect of geometry. Enjoy with them the riches of the esthetic and surprising properties to be found in triangles, quadrilaterals, and circles.
As you marvel at the many unusual relationships and novelties revealed in this ingenious and delightful presentation, you’ll be learning more math than you ever thought possible—and will be relishing every moment of it!
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 269 (illustrations)
ISBN: 978-1-59102-723-2
Shipping Weight: 1lbs
Author Bio:
Alfred S. Posamentier, Ph.D. (New York, NY), is dean of the School of Education and professor of mathematics education at The City College of the City University of New York. He has published more than 40 books in the area of mathematics and mathematics education, including The Fabulous Fibonacci Numbers, Pi: A Biography of the World’s Most Mysterious Number, and Math Charmers: Tantalizing Tidbits for the Mind..
Ingmar Lehmann, Ph.D. (Berlin, Germany), is a mathematics educator at Humboldt University in Berlin and is the coauthor of
The Fabulous Fibonacci Numbers and
Pi: A Biography of the World’s Most Mysterious Number.
