 Softcover edition | |
| Author | Ian Stewart |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Mathematics |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Profile Books |
Publication date | March 1, 2013 [1] |
| Media type | Print, e-book |
| Pages | 320 pp. |
| ISBN | 1846681995 |
The Great Mathematical Problems [note 1] is a 2013 book by Ian Stewart. It discusses fourteen [1] mathematical problems and is written for laypersons. [2] The book has received positive reviews.
Stewart describes important open or recently closed problems in mathematics:
Robert Schaefer of New York Journal of Books [3]
Kirkus Reviews said Stewart "succeed[ed] in illuminating many but not all of some very difficult ideas", and that the book "will enchant math enthusiasts as well as general readers who pay close attention". [1] Robert Schaefer from the New York Journal of Books described "The Great Mathematical Problems" as "both entertaining and accessible", although later noted that "in the end chapters ... explanations of the conjectures get more complicated". [3]
Fred Bortz gave the book a positive review in The Dallas Morning News , commenting "few authors are better at understanding their readers than the prolific mathematics writer Ian Stewart" and saying that "anyone who has always loved math for its own sake or for the way it provides new perspectives on important real-world phenomena will find hours of brain-teasing and mind-challenging delight in the British professor’s survey of recently answered or still open mathematical questions". [4]
Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer, with interests also encompassing scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literature—especially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was also a leading authority on Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies. He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and was regarded as one of the most important magicians of the twentieth century. He was considered the doyen of American puzzlers. He was a prolific and versatile author, publishing more than 100 books.
Danica Mae McKellar is an American actress, mathematics writer, and education advocate. She played Winnie Cooper in the television series The Wonder Years from 1988–1993, and since 2010 has voiced Miss Martian in the animated superhero series Young Justice.
Ian Nicholas Stewart is a British mathematician and a popular-science and science-fiction writer. He is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick, England.
Chasing Vermeer is a 2004 children's art mystery novel written by Blue Balliett and illustrated by Brett Helquist. Set in Hyde Park, Chicago near the University of Chicago, the novel follows two children, Calder Pillay and Petra Andalee. After a famous Johannes Vermeer painting, A Lady Writing, is stolen en route to the Art Institute of Chicago, Calder and Petra work together to try to recover it. The thief publishes many advertisements in the newspaper, explaining that he will give the painting back if the community can discover which paintings under Vermeer's name were really painted by him. This causes Petra, Calder, and the rest of Hyde Park to examine art more closely. Themes of art, chance, coincidence, deception, and problem-solving are apparent.
Popular mathematics is mathematical presentation aimed at a general audience. Sometimes this is in the form of books which require no mathematical background and in other cases it is in the form of expository articles written by professional mathematicians to reach out to others working in different areas.
Steven Henry Strogatz is an American mathematician and the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. He is known for his work on nonlinear systems, including contributions to the study of synchronization in dynamical systems, for his research in a variety of areas of applied mathematics, including mathematical biology and complex network theory, and for his outreach work in the public communication of mathematics.
Constance Bowman Reid was the author of several biographies of mathematicians and popular books about mathematics. She received several awards for mathematical exposition. She was not a mathematician but came from a mathematical family–her sister was Julia Robinson, and her brother-in-law was Raphael M. Robinson.
Brian Clegg is an English science writer. He is the author of popular science books on topics including light, infinity, quantum entanglement and surviving the impact of climate change, and biographies of Roger Bacon and Eadweard Muybridge.
Infinity represents something that is boundless or endless, or else something that is larger than any real or natural number. It is often denoted by the infinity symbol ∞.
Smile is an autobiographical graphic novel written by Raina Telgemeier. It gives an account of the author's life from sixth grade to high school. The book originated as a webcomic, which was serialized on Girlamatic.
The Euler Book Prize is an award named after Swiss mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) and given annually at the Joint Mathematics Meetings by the Mathematical Association of America to an outstanding book in mathematics that is likely to improve the public view of the field.
The Mathematics of Life is a 2011 popular science book by mathematician Ian Stewart, on the increasing role of mathematics in biology.
Eugenia Loh-Gene Cheng is a British mathematician and concert pianist. Her mathematical interests include higher-dimensional category theory, and as a pianist she specialises in lieder and art song. She is also passionate about explaining mathematics to non-mathematicians to rid the world of math phobia, often using entertaining analogies with food and baking. Cheng is a scientist-in-residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
365 Penguins is a 2006 children's book by Jean-Luc Fromental and illustrated by Joelle Jolivet which tells the story of a family who receives a penguin each day for a year. It was a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Award winner.
Wink Poppy Midnight is a young adult mystery novel written by April Genevieve Tucholke and published on March 22, 2016 by Dial Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Penguin Books.
Sisters is an autobiographical graphic novel written by Raina Telgemeier as a follow-up to her earlier graphic memoir Smile. It details a long summer road trip taken from San Francisco to Colorado by her family and explores the relationship between Raina and her younger sister, Amara.
Significant Figures: The Lives and Work of Great Mathematicians is a 2017 nonfiction book by British mathematician Ian Stewart, published by Basic Books. In the work, Stewart discusses the lives and contributions of 25 figures who are prominent in the history of mathematics. The 25 mathematicians selected are: Archimedes, Liu Hui, Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, Madhava of Sangamagrama, Gerolamo Cardano, Pierre de Fermat, Isaac Newton, Euler, Fourier, Gauss, Lobachevsky, Galois, Ada Lovelace, Boole, Riemann, Cantor, Sofia Kovalevskaia, Poincaré, Hilbert, Emmy Noether, Ramanujan, Gödel, Turing, Mandelbrot, and Thurston.
Mycroft and Sherlock is a mystery novel by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse. It is the second novel in their "Mycroft Holmes" series utilizing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's characters of Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes. Having focused solely on Mycroft in the first novel, Abdul-Jabbar and Waterhouse were curious about the relationship between Mycroft and his brother and recognized that the sequel would need the introduction of Sherlock.
In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman: Mathematics at the Limits of Computation is a book on the travelling salesman problem, by William J. Cook, published in 2012 by the Princeton University Press, with a paperback reprint in 2014. The Basic Library List Committee of the Mathematical Association of America has suggested its inclusion in undergraduate mathematics libraries.
In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World is a 2012 nonfiction book by British mathematician Ian Stewart, published by Basic Books. In the book Stewart traced a history of the role of mathematics in human history, beginning with the Pythagorean theorem to the equation that transformed the twenty-first century financial market, the Black–Scholes model.