Overview

Mathematics for the Imagination provides an accessible and entertaining investigation into mathematical problems in the world around us. From world navigation, family trees, and calendars to patterns, tessellations, and number tricks, this informative and fun new book helps you to understand the maths behind real-life questions and rediscover your arithmetical mind.This is a follow-up to the popular Mathematics for the Curious, Peter Higgins's first investigation into real-life mathematical problems.A highly involving book which encourages the reader to enter into the spirit of mathematical exploration.

Full Product Details

9780198604600

Table of Contents

Reviews

`This booklet addresses to a wide circle of readers. In an entertaining way it makes known with mathematical ways of thinking and working, with the history and development of mathematicians throughout the ages and with the beauty of mathematics. It explains some of its most interesting features and gives remarkable examples for the world of classical mathematics. Everyone can find something interesting.' Zentralblatt Math

The author, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Essex and author of Mathematics for the Curious, claims here to be discussing the history and development of mathematics through the ages. He's actually doing much more than that; this is a quick-read primer for anyone who never quite got to grips with the subject at school - mathematics for the uninitiated, sums for the innumerate, geometry for the confused. Higgins's avowed aim is to capture readers' imagination with 'the deepest and most fascinating subject in the world', and he is quite brilliant at using everyday facts to convey quite complex mathematical ideas, with few formulae and lots of graphics - though there are some fairly terrifying bits of algebra if you do as he suggests and dip in at random. But read the book as a smooth flow of ideas and he catches you before you know it - we start out on page two with a reassuringly familiar map of the world as presented by the airlines and - whoosh! - by page three here we are accepting the concept of a geodesic with all the ease of a toddler grasping the difference between a ball and a cube. Carry on and you will learn about the elliptical nature of planetary motion and the translational symmetry of wallpaper patterns, and discover how to measure the height of the Great Pyramid of Cheops and locate the true heart of England. It's not all easy going, but Higgins offers fascinating morsels to keep you going (did you know that Benjamin Franklin invented the concept of daylight saving time, that Pythagoras preached vegetarianism or that Galileo's predictions about gravity based on experiments at the Leaning Tower of Pisa were confirmed by the Apollo astronauts?). (Kirkus UK)

Everyone can find something interesting. Zentralblatt Math

Author Information

Professor of Mathematics at the University of Essex, Peter Higgins is the author of the successful Mathematics for the Curious, (OUP, 1998), and Techniques of Semigroup Theory.

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