Description
Book SynopsisHumanity's love affair with mathematics and mysticism reached a critical juncture, legend has it, on the back of a turtle in ancient China. This book explains why Chinese emperors, Babylonian astrologer-priests, prehistoric cave people in France, and ancient Mayans of the Yucatan were convinced that magic squares held the secret of the universe.
Trade Review"A perpetual idea machine, Clifford Pickover is one of the most creative, original thinkers in the world today."--Journal of Recreational Mathematics "Pickover just seems to exist in more dimensions than the rest of us."--Ian Stewart, Scientific American "Clifford Pickover is many things--scientist, scholar, author, editor, and visionary."--Games "It is a safe bet to conjecture that this is the best recreational mathematics book that will be published in this year... Pickover writes with his usual style and straightforward simplicity in this book. The material is presented well and can be understood by anyone with a basic middle school mathematics background. This is a cool book!"--Charles Ashbacker, Journal of Recreational Mathematics "Through accessible and readable prose and through detailed, highquality line illustrations, Pickover ably transports the general reader from culturally embedded traditional topics to a new and surprising frontier."--Harold Don Allen, Mathematics Teacher "Pickover writes about his subject with contagious enthusiasm and comprehensive erudition."--Choice "A splendid recreational book... An extremely alluring page-turner."--Andrew Bremner, Notices of the American Mathematical Society
Table of ContentsPreface xi Acknowledgments xix Introduction 1 CHAPTER ONE: Magic Construction 37 CHAPTER TWO: Classification 65 CHAPTER THREE: Gallery I : Squares, Cubes, and Tesseracts 147 CHAPTER FOUR: Gallery 2: Circles and Spheres 297 CHAPTER FIVE: Gallery 3: Stars, Hexagons, and Other Beauties 325 Some Final Thoughts 369 Notes 375 For Further Reading 395 Index 397 About the Author 403
