The Mayor Of Uglyvilles Dilemma

The Mayor of Uglyville s Dilemma

2005

But never fear. The answers are at the back of the book.

Author: Ian Stewart

Publisher: Atlantic

ISBN: 184354475X

Category: Mathematical recreations

Page: 88

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Inside this small (but perfectly formed) hardback there lurks some of the most devilishly difficult mathematical brainteasers human beings have yet devised. Woven into them are marvellously witty introductions to some of the key numerical mysteries and paradoxes. Along the way, we meet Klephtnose, the geometrical Pharoah, Stacey Ermine, the winner of the Turnip Prize, the members of Wackingham Cricket Club, the villagers of the town of Much Grumbling and the eponymous Mayor of Uglyville, each of whom present us with a mind-bending mathematical problem. But never fear. The answers are at the back of the book.

Professor Stewart s Casebook of Mathematical Mysteries

2014-10-02

The Annotated Flatland Math Hysteria The Mayor Of Uglyville's Dilemma How To Cut A Cake Letters To A Young Mathematician Taming The Infinite (Alternative Title: The Story Of Mathematics) Why Beauty Is Truth Cows In The Maze Mathematics ...

Author: Ian Stewart

Publisher: Profile Books

ISBN: 9781847654328

Category: Mathematics

Page: 559

View: 237

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Like its wildly popular predecessors Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities and Hoard of Mathematical Treasures, Professor Stewart's brand-new book is a miscellany of over 150 mathematical curios and conundrums, packed with trademark humour and numerous illustrations.In addition to the fascinating formulae and thrilling theorems familiar to Professor Stewart's fans, the Casebook follows the adventures of the not-so-great detective Hemlock Soames and his sidekick Dr John Watsup (immortalised in the phrase 'Watsup, Doc?'). By a remarkable coincidence they live at 222B Baker Street, just across the road from their more illustrious neighbour who, for reasons known only to Dr Watsup, is never mentioned by name. A typical item is 'The Case of the Face-Down Aces', a mathematical magic trick of quite devilish cunning... Ranging from one-liners to four-page investigations from the frontiers of mathematical research, the Casebook reveals Professor Stewart at his challenging and entertaining best.

Professor Stewart s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities

2010-09-03

The Annotated Flatland (with Edwin A. Abbott) Math Hysteria The Mayor of Uglyville's Dilemma Letters to a Young Mathematician How to Cut a Cake Why Beauty is Truth Taming the Infinite with Jack Cohen The Collapse of Chaos Figments of ...

Author: Ian Stewart

Publisher: Profile Books

ISBN: 9781847651280

Category: Mathematics

Page: 320

View: 514

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School maths is not the interesting part. The real fun is elsewhere. Like a magpie, Ian Stewart has collected the most enlightening, entertaining and vexing 'curiosities' of maths over the years... Now, the private collection is displayed in his cabinet. There are some hidden gems of logic, geometry and probability -- like how to extract a cherry from a cocktail glass (harder than you think), a pop up dodecahedron, the real reason why you can't divide anything by zero and some tips for making money by proving the obvious. Scattered among these are keys to unlocking the mysteries of Fermat's last theorem, the Poincar Conjecture, chaos theory, and the P/NP problem for which a million dollar prize is on offer. There are beguiling secrets about familiar names like Pythagoras or prime numbers, as well as anecdotes about great mathematicians. Pull out the drawers of the Professor's cabinet and who knows what could happen...

Calculating the Cosmos

2016-09-15

The Annotated Flatland Math Hysteria The Mayor of Uglyville's Dilemma How to Cut a Cake Letters to a Young Mathematician Taming the Infinite (Alternative Title: The Story Of Mathematics) Why Beauty is Truth Cows in the Maze Professor ...

Author: Ian Stewart

Publisher: Profile Books

ISBN: 9781782831501

Category: Science

Page: 285

View: 548

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Ian Stewart's up-to-the-minute guide to the cosmos moves from the formation of the Earth and its Moon to the planets and asteroids of the solar system and from there out into the galaxy and the universe. He describes the architecture of space and time, dark matter and dark energy, how galaxies form, why stars implode, how everything began, and how it will end. He considers parallel universes, what forms extra-terrestrial life might take, and the likelihood of Earth being hit by an asteroid. Mathematics, Professor Stewart shows, has been the driving force in astronomy and cosmology since the ancient Babylonians. He describes how Kepler's work on planetary orbits led Newton to formulate his theory of gravity, and how two centuries later irregularities in the motion of Mars inspired Einstein's theory of general relativity. In crystal-clear terms he explains the fundamentals of gravity, spacetime, relativity and quantum theory, and shows how they all relate to each other. Eighty years ago the discovery that the universe is expanding led to the Big Bang theory of its origins. This in turn led cosmologists to posit features such as dark matter and dark energy. But does dark matter exist? Could another scientific revolution be on the way to challenge current scientific orthodoxy? These are among the questions Ian Stewart raises in his quest through the realms of astronomy and cosmology.

Significant Figures

2017-08-10

(revised edition: The Beauty of Numbers in Nature) The Annotated Flatland Math Hysteria The Mayor of Uglyville's Dilemma How to Cut a Cake Letters to a Young Mathematician Taming the Infinite (alternative title: The Story Of ...

Author: Ian Stewart

Publisher: Profile Books

ISBN: 9781782831495

Category: Science

Page: 236

View: 126

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Which mathematician elaborated a crucial concept the night before he died in a duel? Who funded his maths and medical career through gambling and chess? Who learned maths from her wallpaper? Ian Stewart presents the extraordinary lives and amazing discoveries of twenty-five of history's greatest mathematicians from Archimedes and Liu Hui to Benoit Mandelbrot and William Thurston. His subjects are the inspiring individuals from all over the world who have made crucial contributions to mathematics. They include the rediscovered geniuses Srinivasa Ramanujan and Emmy Noether, alongside the towering figures of Muhammad al-Khwarizmi (inventor of the algorithm), Pierre de Fermat, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, Bernhard Reimann (precursor to Einstein), Henri Poincar, Ada Lovelace (arguably the first computer programmer), Kurt Gdel and Alan Turing. Ian Stewart's vivid accounts are fascinating in themselves and, taken together, cohere into a riveting history of key steps in the development of mathematics.

Mathematics Of Life

2011-04-07

The Annotated Flatland Math Hysteria The Mayor of Uglyville's Dilemma Letters to a Young Mathematician Why Beauty Is Truth How to Cut a Cake Taming the Infinite: The Story of Mathematics Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical ...

Author: Ian Stewart

Publisher: Profile Books

ISBN: 9781847653505

Category: Mathematics

Page: 335

View: 333

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A new partnership of biologists and mathematicians is picking apart the hidden complexity of animals and plants to throw fresh light on the behaviour of entire organisms, how they interact and how changes in biological diversity affect the planet's ecological balance. Mathematics offers new and sometimes startling perspectives on evolution and how patterns of inheritance and population work out over time-scales ranging from millions to hundreds of years - as well as what's going on to change us right now. Ian Stewart, in characteristically clear and entertaining fashion, explores these and a whole range of pertinent issues, including how far genes control behaviour and the nature of life itself. He shows how far mathematicians and biologists are succeeding in tackling some of the most difficult scientific problems the human race has ever confronted and where their research is currently taking us.

The Science Of Discworld

2013-04-11

THE ANNOTATED FLATLAND MATH HYSTERIA - THE MAYOR OF UGLYVILLE'S DILEMMA HOW TO CUT A CAKE - LETTERS TO A YOUNG MATHEMATICIAN TAMING THE INFINITE (alternative title: THE STORY OF MATHEMATICS) WHY BEAUTY IS TRUTH - COWS IN THE MAZE ...

Author: Terry Pratchett

Publisher: Random House

ISBN: 9781448176670

Category: Fiction

Page: 416

View: 140

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The fantastic first book in the Sunday Times bestselling Science of Discworld series When a wizardly experiment goes adrift, the wizards of Unseen University find themselves with a pocket universe on their hands: Roundworld, where neither magic nor common sense seems to stand a chance against logic. The Universe, of course, is our own. And Roundworld is Earth. As the wizards watch their accidental creation grow, we follow the story of our universe from the primal singularity of the Big Bang to the internet and beyond. Through this original Terry Pratchett story (with intervening chapters from Cohen and Stewart) we discover how puny and insignificant individual lives are against a cosmic backdrop of creation and disaster. Yet, paradoxically, we see how the richness of a universe based on rules, has led to a complex world and at least one species that tried to get a grip of what was going on. Terry Pratchett is the acclaimed creator of the global bestselling Discworld series, the first of which, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. Raising Steam is his fortieth Discworld novel. His books have been widely adapted for stage and screen, and he is the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, as well as being awarded a knighthood for services to literature. After falling out with his keyboard he now talks to his computer. Occasionally, these days, it answers back. www.terrypratchett.co.uk @terryandrob Professor Ian Stewart is the author of many popular science books. He is the mathematics consultant for New Scientist and a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick. He was awarded the Michael Faraday Prize for furthering the public understanding of science, and in 2001 became a Fellow of the Royal Society. Dr Jack Cohen is an internationally-known reproductive biologist, and lives in Newent, Gloucestershire. Jack has a laboratory in his kitchen, helps couples get pregnant by referring them to colleagues, invents biologically realistic aliens for science fiction writers and, in his spare time, throws boomerangs. Jack, who has more letters to his name than can be repeated here, writes, lectures, talks and campaigns to promote public awareness of science, particularly biology. He is mostly retired.

Do Dice Play God

2019-06-06

Author: Ian Stewart

Publisher: Profile Books

ISBN: 9781782834014

Category: Mathematics

Page: 292

View: 851

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Uncertainty is everywhere. It lurks in every consideration of the future - the weather, the economy, the sex of an unborn child - even quantities we think that we know such as populations or the transit of the planets contain the possibility of error. It's no wonder that, throughout that history, we have attempted to produce rigidly defined areas of uncertainty - we prefer the surprise party to the surprise asteroid. We began our quest to make certain an uncertain world by reading omens in livers, tea leaves, and the stars. However, over the centuries, driven by curiosity, competition, and a desire be better gamblers, pioneering mathematicians and scientists began to reduce wild uncertainties to tame distributions of probability and statistical inferences. But, even as unknown unknowns became known unknowns, our pessimism made us believe that some problems were unsolvable and our intuition misled us. Worse, as we realized how omnipresent and varied uncertainty is, we encountered chaos, quantum mechanics, and the limitations of our predictive power. Bestselling author Professor Ian Stewart explores the history and mathematics of uncertainty. Touching on gambling, probability, statistics, financial and weather forecasts, censuses, medical studies, chaos, quantum physics, and climate, he makes one thing clear: a reasonable probability is the only certainty.

Professor Stewart s Incredible Numbers

2015-03-19

Author: Ian Stewart

Publisher: Profile Books

ISBN: 9781782831587

Category: Mathematics

Page: 341

View: 275

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Ian Stewart explores the astonishing properties of numbers from 1 to 10 to zero and infinity, including one figure that, if you wrote it out, would span the universe. He looks at every kind of number you can think of -- real, imaginary, rational, irrational, positive and negative -- along with several you might have thought you couldn't think of. He explains the insights of the ancient mathematicians, shows how numbers have evolved through the ages, and reveals the way numerical theory enables everyday life. Under Professor Stewart's guidance you will discover the mathematics of codes, Sudoku, Rubik's Cube, music, primes and pi. You may be surprised to find you live in eleven-dimensional space, that of the twenty-three people on a football pitch two are more likely than not to share the same birthday, and that forty-two is a very interesting number. Professor Stewart's Incredible Numbers will delight everyone who loves numbers -- including those who currently think they don't.

Professor Stewart s Hoard of Mathematical Treasures

2010-12-09

The Annotated Flatland (with Edwin A. Abbott) Math Hysteria The Mayor of Uglyville's Dilemma Letters to a Young Mathematician How to Cut a Cake Why Beauty Is Truth Taming the Infinite Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical ...

Author: Ian Stewart

Publisher: Profile Books

ISBN: 9781847652621

Category: Mathematics

Page: 339

View: 341

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Ian Stewart, author of the bestselling Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, presents a new and magical mix of games, puzzles, paradoxes, brainteasers, and riddles. He mingles these with forays into ancient and modern mathematical thought, appallingly hilarious mathematical jokes, and enquiries into the great mathematical challenges of the present and past. Amongst a host of arcane and astonishing facts about every kind of number from irrational or imaginary to complex or cuneiform, we find out: how to organise chaos; how matter balances anti-matter; how to turn a sphere inside out (without creasing it...); why you can't comb a hairy ball; how to calculate pi by observing the stars. And we get some tantalising glimpses of the maths of life and the universe.Mind-stretching, enlightening and endlessly amusing, Professor Stewart's new entertainment will stimulate, delight, and enthral.

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