Barry Cipra

The AMS series What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences distills the amazingly rich brew of current research in mathematics down to a few choice samples. This volume leads off with an update on the Poincare Conjecture, a hundred-year-old problem that has apparently been solved by Grigory Perelman of St. Petersburg, Russia. So what did topologists do when the oldest and most famous problem about closed manifolds was vanquished? As the second chapter describes, they confronted asuite of problems concerning the ''ends'' of open manifolds ... and solved those, too. Not to be outdone, number theorists accomplished several unexpected feats in the first five years of the new century, from computing a trillion digits of pi to finding arbitrarily long equally-spaced sequences ofprime numbers. Undergraduates made key discoveries, as explained in the chapters on Venn diagrams and primality testing. In applied mathematics, the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid mechanics continued to stir up interest. One team proved new theorems about the long-term evolution of vortices, while others explored the surprising ways that insects use vortices to move around. The random jittering of Brownian motion became a little less mysterious. Finally, an old and trusted algorithm ofcomputer science had its trustworthiness explained in a novel way. Barry Cipra explains these new developments in his wry and witty style, familiar to readers of Volumes 1-5, and is joined in this volume by Dana Mackenzie. Volume 6 of What's Happening will convey to all readers--from mathematical novicesto experts--the beauty and wonder that is mathematics.

What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences

Erik D. Demaine

Martin L. Demaine

Tom Rodgers

The tradition of a publication based on the Gathering for Gardner continues with this new carefully selected and edited collection in which Martin Gardner and friends inspire and entertain. The contributors to this volume---virtually a list of Who's Who in the World of Puzzles---trace their inspiration to Martin Gardner's puzzle column in Scientific American and to his contributions to the world of recreational mathematics. Tribute to a Mathemagician contains an author index for the two previous books in the collection of books based on the Gatherings for Gardner. Sample puzzles and games include: - Tripos - Black Jack - Chinese ceramic puzzle vessels - Paper folding - Mongolian interlocking puzzles - Rolling block puzzles - Sliding puzzles - Cryptic crosswords - The Panex puzzle - Polyonimo puzzles - and more

Tribute to a Mathemagician

This unusual, but very useful, 'how-not-to' book is available in a second edition which eliminates most involuntary mistakes. Three well-known teachers have testified to its value: Ross L. Finney, coauthor of Calculus and Analytic Geometry; Philip J. Davis, coauthor of The mathematical Experience; and Ralph P. Boas, former editor of The American Mathematical Monthly.

Misteaks [sic] and how to Find Them Before the Teacher Does

An unusual supplement to every calculus textbook, Misteaks and How to Find Them before the Teacher Does is popular with students and teachers alike. Teachers love the way it encourages students to truly think about mathematics rather than simply plugging numbers into equations to crank out answers, and students love the author's straightforward, tongue-in-cheek style. The title of this light-hearted and amusing book might well have been "Going Gray in Elementary Calculus and How to Avoid it." Changing the metaphor, Barry has hit the nail on the finger in hundreds of fine examples. --Philip J. Davis, coauthor of The Mathematical Experience. "How I wish that something like this had been available when I was a student!" --Ralph P. Boas, former editor of The American Mathematical Monthly. Bonus: Solution to LeWitt Puzzle

A Calculus Supplement, 3rd Edition

Misteaks. . . and how to find them before the teacher does. . .

The tradition of a publication based on the Gathering for Gardner continues with this new carefully selected and edited collection in which Martin Gardner and friends inspire and entertain. The contributors to this volume---virtually a list of Who's Who in the World of Puzzles---trace their inspiration to Martin Gardner's puzzle column in Scientifi

American Mathematical Society

This volume covers a new class of solitons, the contributions wavelets are making to solving scientific problems, how mathematics is improving medical imaging, and Andrew Wiles's work on Fermat's "Last Theorem". This work is aimed at undergraduates, graduate students and mathematics clubs.

Barry Cipra

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