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Title: The Colossal Book of Mathematics: Classic Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Problems by Martin Gardner ISBN: 0-393-02023-1 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 10 September, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.17 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The imporatance of Mathematics
Comment: Martin Gardner is the grand old man of popular mathematics. He especially likes the math behind puzzles, riddles and logical conundrums. Logic and mathematics is the source of his thinking on the Skepticism he professes in his writings on pseudoscience, religion, the paranormal, UFO's, and other outlands of science and rational thinking.
This book is a collection of his best columns from Scientific American magazine. It was of the good reasons to read the magazine. Like many other things in the last few years, that publication jumped the shark at some point. Gardner was one of the reasons to still read it for a while there.
Gardner, however, is not just interested in the mathematics. The men, and history of the questions is also important to him. That is because it forms a context to the questions and the discovery of the answers. Context is very important to the author. Without it, you really don't know where you are.
If you like the writing of such good folks like Douglas Hofstadter, Jeremy Bernstein, Eli Maor, John Allen Paulos, Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke or Ed Regis, than you will probably like the writing of Gardner.
Mathematics is something that people don't read a lot. At least not recreationally. Normally because they don't understand that it forms the basis of real logical thought. A real understanding of the modern world requires one of the understand science. And science that isn't, at least in part, based on mathematics isn't real science. It is something more of our leaders should take a real interest in. How can we expect our leaders to make good decisions on cloning or when-life-begins if they have no real understanding of science and mathematics?
Which is why Martin Gardner should be considered a national treasure.
Rating: 5
Summary: A fun and interesting read
Comment: This book covers a wide variety of subjects. It is not a puzzle book in the strict sense of solving little teasers, but it is a book that starts one thinking in broader terms. Some paradoxes and concepts addressed in this book, that great thinkers spent time debating and questioning, are fun for us more common thinkers to consider as well.
Rating: 3
Summary: Interesting in parts, but certainly not what it claims to be
Comment: This book is certainly not a "Colossal Book of Mathematics", and if you are looking for a book full of "Classic Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Problems", this book is not it. In short, the title is wrong and deliberatly misleading. That should be enough for one not to buy this book at all, for why should one, when the author tries a con-artist trick with the title itself?
A lot of the book is full of information about stuff that is tangential to mathematics at best, like Escher drawings and other art. Escher is fine, but devoting so many pages to the symmetry drawings of a certain Mr. Kim is way out of line with what a reader might expect of this book. The "fake" chapter is also in bad taste for a book of this nature. Obviously "once bitten twice shy" is not something Gardner believes in.
Also an absence of adequate proofreading is evident. For example, the author claims that N is symmetrical about a horizontal axis. Also wrong (or incomplete) is Gardner's proof about why the second player can never guarantee a win in generalized tictactoe (the "proof" actually proves that the second player can't guarantee a win without looking at the first player's first move). More? The book says 1/0 is meaningless, and this in a chapter on infinity!
I however liked some parts of the book, for example an argument against the parallel universe theory is almost literature (it is not Gardner's but somebody else's whose name I've forgotten, unfortunately Gardner does not come across as anything more than a dilettante). Other interesting bits and pieces exist, too numerous to describe here, but scarcely enough to warrant a purchase. On the other hand, if your local library has a copy of this book, it's not a bad one to borrow.
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Title: My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles by Martin Gardner ISBN: 0486281523 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 November, 1994 List Price(USD): $4.95 |
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Title: Entertaining Math Puzzles by Martin Gardner ISBN: 0486252116 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 October, 1986 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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Title: Perplexing Puzzles by Martin Gardner ISBN: 0486256375 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 01 May, 1988 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: The Moscow Puzzles : 359 Mathematical Recreations by Boris A. Kordemsky ISBN: 0486270785 Publisher: Dover Pubns Pub. Date: 10 April, 1992 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: A Gardner's Workout: Training the Mind and Entertaining the Spirit by Martin Gardner ISBN: 1568811209 Publisher: AK Peters Ltd Pub. Date: 01 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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