The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. — George Bernard Shaw (attributed) Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century Masha...

In this interview we sit down with author and mathematician Derrick Niederman to discuss his engaging, recently published book about the first two hundred natural numbers, ‘Number Freak: From 1 to 200, The Hidden Language of Numbers Revealed’. 1. Some of our readers are likely familiar with your...

In my last blog entry, I mentioned several math books I’ve been reading lately. Over the weekend I wrapped up reading Mathematicians: An Outer View of the Inner World, and wanted to take the opportunity to review it here. Mathematicians: An Outer View of the Inner World is a hardcover book of photos...

With summertime underway, I thought I would share a list of 12 mathematical books that I’ve been reading between the beginning of this year and now. Some of them are absolutely excellent titles, but I’d say that each of the books listed was interesting and worth recommending. I bought some of...

Last weekend I had a chance to read Math for Moms and Dads, which I received from Kaplan as a review copy. This book aims to providing a friendly guide for parents of children ages ten and up, who are struggling with mathematics. Many parents face the challenge of helping their children with math homework,...

This article was written by Gregory Thole, a graduate student in mathematics at Boston College. If you’d like to write for Math-Blog.com as well, please email us at submissions@math-blog.com. And what was he? Forsooth, a great arithmetician. -Shakespeare Othello, I.i Perhaps it should not be...

I recently got a hold of what I consider to be the nicest mathematical book in my collection. As a matter of fact, it’s the nicest book I own, period – even though I posses bookshelves teaming with terrific titles on mathematics, science, programming, computer science, photography and so on. The...

Pythagoras, Euler, and G.H. Hardy, if you’re interested in math or if you paid attention in school, chances are you’ve heard of these famous names and may be familiar with their work and accomplishments. But how about Agnesi, Cartwright or Goldwasser? These three names are amongst ten that we’ve...

gnuplot is an excellent scientific package for visualizing data and plotting functions. Despite its name, it has nothing to do with the GNU project, even though it’s Open Source and entirely free. This tool is very handy whenever you need to produce production quality graphics from a given data-set (or...

Imagine a rope that was just long enough to wrap tightly around the equator of a perfectly spherical earth. Now imagine that the length of that rope is increased by one meter and again wrapped around the earth, supported in a regular way, so as to form an annulus. Doing things in this way will form a certain...