Reviews for Mathematics Experiments

The average rating for Mathematics Experiments based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-01-19 00:00:00 Tracey Mackay A series of very good essays, aimed at bringing math alive to a general audience, originally given as public lectures in an annual series that is 168 years old, starting with Michael Faraday. By Ian Stewart, one of the best popular math writers of our day. What I especially like is this comment on the nature of mathematics in the introduction: What is a businessman? Someone who does business? Yes, but not just that. A businessman is someone who sees an opportunity for doing business where the rest of us see nothing: while we're complaining that there's no restaurant in the area, he's organising a telephone pizza delivery service. A mathematician is someone who sees opportunities for doing mathematics that the rest of us miss.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-03-01 00:00:00 Krisztian Kiss "A wild dream, a fantasy. The magical maze is not like the Minotaur's labyrinth. It cannot be explored in an afternoon, a month, or a millennium. Some parts are for ever inaccessible. But even those parts that ARE accessible are already of infinite extent..." Ian Stewart's journey through the mathematical is incredibly well written and engaging. Even if you're not interested in maths, there's plenty here to give you new insights into things that you've probably always wondered, "how does this work?" There is plenty of history to get stuck into too, and lots of real world examples; how do pacemakers work? Or how do we send compressed image, audio or video data? How can probability be like water? How are tiling designs made? My favourite is probably the example of Christiaan Huygens, the man who invented the pendulum clock. In 1665, ill and confined to his room, he stared at two of his clocks sharing a shelf. They were ticking in synchrony! The implications this would have for the world concerning coupled oscillators were astonishing. If you have an interest in puzzles, maths, general knowledge or are just plain curious, then this is a book for you! Rav.