ProofWiki:Books/Ian Stewart/The Problems of Mathematics

Ian Stewart: The Problems of Mathematics

Published 1987, 2nd Edition 1992, Opus (Oxford University Press).

ISBN 0-19-286148-4

Subject Matter

• History of Mathematics
• Philosophy of Mathematics

Contents

Foreword

Foreword to the second edition

List of Figures

Interview with a mathematician

Interview to the second edition

1 The nature of mathematics

2 The price of primality

3 Marginal interest

4 The neglected book of Euclid

5 Parallel thinking

6 Sphereful symmetry

7 The miraculous jar

8 Ghosts of departed quantities

9 The duellist and the monster

10 Much ado about knotting

11 The purple wallflower

12 Squarerooting the unsquarerootable

13 Squaring the unsquarable

14 Strumpet Fortune

15 The mathematics of nature

16 Oh! Catastrophe!

17 The patterns of chaos

18 The two-and-a-halfth dimension

19 The lonely wave

20 More ado about knotting

21 Dixit Algorizmi

22 The limits of computability

23 The ultimate in technology transfer

Further Reading

Index