Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities reviewed on G&M online

Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, by Ian Stewart
978-0465013029 | $18.50 pb | in stock
Basic Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Martin Levin has posted an online review of Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities on the Globe & Mail website:

The numbers games

REVIEWED BY MARTIN LEVIN
Globe and Mail Update
February 20, 2009 at 10:33 AM EST

When one of my sons was in Grade 10, he had a mathematics teacher who spoke little English, and thus was able to convey only — and that barely — the structure of the math, and never its underlying meaning, never mind its beauty, one might even say sublimity.

It’s all too common a story, and a major reason why so many people are arithmophobic, falling into fear and trembling at the very mention of the M word.

Which is why I devoutly wish that there were more math teachers like Ian Stewart. Stewart, a professor of — fittingly — mathematics at England’s Warwick University, has written more than 70 books, many of them popular, accessible, even breezy excursions into math and science.

He’s also written extensively for major magazines in the field (Scientific American, New Scientist) and for newspapers, including this one.

My own favourite among his books is The Annotated Flatland, a masterful introduction to and analysis of Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 metamathemagical classic Flatland, an enchanting novel that is at once a look at how we perceive dimensions and a pointed satire on Victorian society.

I cannot say that Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities is a sure cure for arithmophobia; it is, after all, replete with numbers and equations and brain-bending problems. But if you’re not afraid of, say, shapes that one expects not to recognize during intelligence tests (to wit: the dodecahedron, with its dozen pentagonal faces, 20 vertices and 30 edges), you will find here an extensive and varied miscellany of all things mathematical.

Other than those you studied in school, that is. For Stewart, who began collecting mathematica in notebooks at the age of 14 (eventually his collection spilled over into a filing cabinet; thus the title), it is precisely extracurricular math that’s so seductive. His enthusiasm is contagious if you give it half a chance.

There are some 200 curiosities in Stewart’s cabinet (cabinets of curiosities were all the rage in 17th-century Europe; essentially, they were rooms turned into private museums featuring all manner of natural and man-made, well, curiosities). There are classic puzzles (Murder in the Park), puzzles devised by Stewart, logic problems, paradoxes and calculations, such as, "What positive integer [i.e. number] is equal to its own Scrabble score when spelt out in full?" I’ll give you that one — it’s twelve — but for the rest, you’re on your own.

There are mathematical jokes, calculated not to make you laugh, but to understand what makes mathematicians laugh. Here’s an example:

Why did the chicken cross the Möbius band?

To get to the other … um …

And if, for instance, you’ve ever craved a brief and lucid explanation of Gödel’s Theorem (I realize that’s it’s possible you have not), Stewart’s your man. If you’ve ever heard of fractals or Fibonacci numbers (which you have if you’ve read The Da Vinci Code) and want enough information to bluff your way through cocktail-party chatter, look no further.

The best way to read this book is as Stewart intends it to be read: piecemeal, randomly, finding something that interests you. But if you are at all seducible by the beauty of mathematics, I think I can guarantee that, after several hours spent in the company of Ian Stewart and his curiosities, you will never be quite so arithmophobic again.

Martin Levin is Books editor of The Globe and Mail. In Grade 12, he managed to avoid a terrible math teacher almost entirely, employing a variety of subterfuges.