Professor Stewart's Hoard of Mathematical Treasures

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

with Jack Cohen
The Collapse of Chaos
Figments of Reality
What Does a Martian Look Like?
Wheelers
(science fiction)
Heaven (science fiction)

 

with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen
The Science of Discworld
The Science of Discworld II: The Globe
The Science of Discworld III: Darwin’s Watch

The following figures are reproduced with the permission of the named copyright holders:

Pages 30, 280 (‘What Seamus Didn’t Know’); Suppiya Siranan.

Page 41 (‘What is the Area of an Ostrich Egg?’); Hierakonpolis expedition, leader Renée Friedman, photograph by James Rossiter.

Page 69 (‘Mathematical Cats’); Dr Sergey P. Kuznetsov, Laboratory of Theoretical Nonlinear Dynamics, SB IRE RAS.

Page 92 (‘How to See Inside Things’); Brad Petersen.

Page 107 (‘Alexander’s Horned Sphere’); from Topology by John G. Hocking and Gail S. Young, Addison-Wesley, 1961.

Page 113 (‘Just a Phase I’m Going Through’); GNU Free Documentation License, Free Software Foundation (
www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
).

Page 182 (‘The Klein Bottle’); Janet Chao (
www.illustrationideas.com
).

Page 184 (‘The Klein Bottle’); Konrad Polthier, Free University of Berlin.

Page 190 (‘Multiplying with Sticks’); Eric Marcotte PhD (
www.sliderule.ca
).

Page 216 (‘How to Turn a Sphere Inside Out’); Bruce Puckett.

When I was fourteen, I started collecting mathematical curiosities. I’ve been doing that for nearly fifty years now, and the collection has outgrown the original notebook. So when my publisher suggested putting together a mathematical miscellany, there was no shortage of material. The result was Professor Stewart’s Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities.

Cabinet was published in 2008, and, as Christmas loomed, it began to defy the law of gravity. Or perhaps to obey the law of levity. Anyway, by Boxing Day it had risen to number 16 in a well-known national bestseller list, and by late January it had peaked at number 6. A mathematics book was sharing company with Stephenie Meyer, Barack Obama, Jamie Oliver and Paul McKenna.

This was, of course, completely impossible: everyone knows that there aren’t that many people interested in mathematics. Either my relatives were buying a huge number of copies, or the conventional wisdom needed a rethink. So then I got an email from my publisher asking whether there might be any prospect of a sequel, and I thought, ‘My suddenly famous Cabinet is still bursting at the seams with goodies, so why not?’ Professor Stewart’s Hoard of Mathematical Treasures duly emerged from darkened drawers into the bright light of day.

It’s just what you need to while away the hours on your desert island. Like its predecessor, you can dip in anywhere. In fact, you could shuffle both books together, and still dip in anywhere. A miscellany, I have said before and stoutly maintain,
should be miscellaneous. It need not stick to any fixed logical order. In fact, it shouldn’t, if only because there isn’t one. If I want to sandwich a puzzle allegedly invented by Euclid between a story about Scandinavian kings playing dice for the ownership of an island and a calculation of how likely it is for monkeys to randomly type the complete works of Shakespeare, then why not?

We live in a world where finding time to work systematically through a long and complicated argument or discussion gets ever more difficult. That’s still the best way to stay properly informed - I’m not decrying it. I even try it myself when the world lets me. But when the scholarly method won’t work, there’s an alternative, one that requires only a few minutes here and there. Apparently quite a lot of you find that to your taste, so here we go again. As one radio interviewer remarked about Cabinet (sympathetically, I believe), ‘I suppose it’s the ideal toilet book.’ Now, Avril and I actually go out of our way not to leave books in the loo for visitors to read, because we don’t want to have to bang on the door at 1 a.m. to remove a guest who has found War and Peace unexpectedly gripping. And we don’t want to risk getting stuck in there ourselves.