In August of 1986, a special conference on recreational mathematics was held at the University of Calgary to celebrate the founding of the Strens Collection. Leading practitioners of recreational mathematics from around the world gathered in Calgary to share with each other the joy and spirit of play that is to be found in recreational mathematics. It would be difficult to find a better collection of wonderful articles on recreational mathematics by a more distinguished group of authors. If you are interested in tessellations, Escher, tilings, Rubik's cube, pentominoes, games, puzzles, the arbelos, Henry Dudeney, or change ringing, then this book is for you.

Martin Gardner is widely known for his writing on recreational mathematics, not least for the myriad problems he has devised over some 25 years for Scientific American. In this book are 36 of his best brainteasers. These are not simply cunning puzzles, but serve to illustrate the art of the mathematician as problem solver, and their solution draws on ideas from topology, probability, number theory, logic and beyond. Fully worked answers are given, which, in turn, lead to additional problems for the reader. For anybody who likes to solve mathematical problems, this book will be both entertaining and a challenge.

MAA Press: An Imprint of the American Mathematical Society This collection will give students (high school or beyond), teachers, and university professors a chance to experience the pleasure of wrestling with some beautiful problems of elementary mathematics. Readers can compare their sleuthing talents with those of Sherlock Holmes, who made a bad mistake regarding the first problem in the collection: Determine the direction of travel of a bicycle that has left its tracks in a patch of mud. Which Way did the Bicycle Go? contains a variety of other unusual and interesting problems in geometry, algebra, combinatorics, and number theory. For example, if a pizza is sliced into eight 45-degree wedges meeting at a point other than the center of the pizza, and two people eat alternate wedges, will they get equal amounts of pizza? Or: What is the rightmost nonzero digit of the product 1⋅2⋅3⋯1,000,000 1⋅2⋅3⋯1,000,000? Or: Is a manufacturer's claim that a certain unusual combination lock allows thousands of combinations justified? Complete solutions to the 191 problems are included along with problem variations and topics for investigation.

The purpose of this book is to demonstrate that complex numbers and geometry can be blended together beautifully. This results in easy proofs and natural generalizations of many theorems in plane geometry, such as the Napoleon theorem, the Ptolemy-Euler theorem, the Simson theorem, and the Morley theorem. The book is self-contained—no background in complex numbers is assumed—and can be covered at a leisurely pace in a one-semester course. Many of the chapters can be read independently. Over 100 exercises are included. The book would be suitable as a text for a geometry course, or for a problem solving seminar, or as enrichment for the student who wants to know more.

As the co-authors present 13 of American Prof. of Russian Lee B. Croft's scholarly articles (in English with Russian examples), the articles fascinate as they advance the reader's knowledge of: glossolalia, poetic decipherment and translation, language philosophy and psychology, linguistic iconicity and language universals, an American Nobel-laureate scientist's inspiration, literary pornography, pervasive triplicity, spontaneous human combustion and polylingual alphamagic squares.

This book contains 500 problems that range over a wide spectrum of areas of high school mathematics and levels of difficulty. Some are simple mathematical puzzlers while others are serious problems at the Olympiad level. Students of all levels of interest and ability will be entertained and taught by the book. For many problems, more than one solution is supplied so that students can see how different approaches can be taken to a problem and compare the elegance and efficiency of different tools that might be applied. Teachers at both the college and secondary levels will find the book useful, both for encouraging their students and for their own pleasure. Some of the problems can be used to provide a little spice in the regular curriculum by demonstrating the power of very basic techniques. This collection provides a solid base for students who wish to enter competitions at the Olympiad level. They can begin with easy problems and progress to more demanding ones. A special mathematical tool chest summarizes the results and techniques needed by competition-level students.

This textbook is for prospective teachers of middle school mathematics. It reflects on the authors’ experience in offering various mathematics education courses to prospective teachers in the US and Canada. In particular, the content can support one or more of 24-semester-hour courses recommended by the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (2012) for the mathematical preparation of middle school teachers. The textbook integrates grade-appropriate content on all major topics in the middle school mathematics curriculum with international recommendations for teaching the content, making it relevant for a global readership. The textbook emphasizes the inherent connections between mathematics and real life, since many mathematical concepts and procedures stem from common sense, something that schoolchildren intuitively possess. This focus on teaching formal mathematics with reference to real life and common sense is essential to its pedagogical approach. In addition, the textbook stresses the importance of being able to use technology as an exploratory tool, and being familiar with its strengths and weaknesses. In keeping with this emphasis on the use of technology, both physical (manipulatives) and digital (commonly available educational software), it also explores e.g. the use of computer graphing software for digital fabrication. In closing, the textbook addresses the issue of creativity as a crucial aspect of education in the digital age in general, and in mathematics education in particular.

Covering a span of almost 4000 years, from the ancient Babylonians to the eighteenth century, this collection chronicles the enormous changes in mathematical thinking over this time as viewed by distinguished historians of mathematics from the past and the present. Each of the four sections of the book (Ancient Mathematics, Medieval and Renaissance Mathematics, The Seventeenth Century, The Eighteenth Century) is preceded by a Foreword, in which the articles are put into historical context, and followed by an Afterword, in which they are reviewed in the light of current historical scholarship. In more than one case, two articles on the same topic are included to show how knowledge and views about the topic changed over the years. This book will be enjoyed by anyone interested in mathematics and its history - and, in particular, by mathematics teachers at secondary, college, and university levels.

At the turn of the twentieth century, mathematical scholarship in the United States underwent a stunning transformation. In 1890 no American professor was producing mathematical research worthy of international attention. Graduate students were then advised to pursue their studies abroad. By the start of World War I the standing of American mathematics had radically changed. George David Birkhoff, Leonard Dickson, and others were turning out cutting edge investigations that attracted notice in the intellectual centers of Europe. Harvard, Chicago, and Princeton maintained graduate programs comparable to those overseas. This book explores the people, timing, and factors behind this rapid advance. Through the mid-nineteenth century most American colleges followed a classical curriculum that, in mathematics, rarely reached beyond calculus. With no doctoral programs of any sort in the United States until 1860, mathematical scholarship lagged far behind that in Europe. After the Civil War, visionary presidents at Harvard and Johns Hopkins broadened and deepened the opportunities for study. The breakthrough for mathematics began in 1890 with the hiring, in consecutive years, of William F. Osgood and Maxime Bôcher at Harvard and E. H. Moore at Chicago. Each of these young men had studied in Germany where they acquired vital mathematical knowledge and taste. Over the next few years Osgood, Bôcher, and Moore established their own research programs and introduced new graduate courses. Working with other like-minded individuals through the nascent American Mathematical Society, the infrastructure of meetings and journals were created. In the early twentieth century Princeton dramatically upgraded its faculty to give the United States the stability of a third mathematics center. The publication by Birkhoff, in 1913, of the solution to a famous conjecture served notice that American mathematics had earned consideration with the European powers of Germany, France, Italy, England, and Russia.