Five-minute Mathematics

This collection of one hundred short essays gives readers a grand tour through contemporary and everyday mathematics. Behrends provides classics from his newspaper column in Die Welt, expands and illustrates them, and gives readers just enough information at a time to build mastery of concepts and applications. The topics range from pure mathematics to applied math, but all essays are suspenseful and fun to read. This is a very handy tool for teachers of all levels of mathematics (even elementary school children will be able to handle some of the topics), and Behrends assumes his readership has and interest but only a minimal background in mathematics so the essays are accessible but not dumbed-down.