An unusual supplement to every calculus textbook, Misteaks and How to Find Them before the Teacher Does is popular with students and teachers alike. Teachers love the way it encourages students to truly think about mathematics rather than simply plugging numbers into equations to crank out answers, and students love the author's straightforward, tongue-in-cheek style. The title of this light-hearted and amusing book might well have been "Going Gray in Elementary Calculus and How to Avoid it." Changing the metaphor, Barry has hit the nail on the finger in hundreds of fine examples. --Philip J. Davis, coauthor of The Mathematical Experience. "How I wish that something like this had been available when I was a student!" --Ralph P. Boas, former editor of The American Mathematical Monthly. Bonus: Solution to LeWitt Puzzle

The tradition of a publication based on the Gathering for Gardner continues with this new carefully selected and edited collection in which Martin Gardner and friends inspire and entertain. The contributors to this volume---virtually a list of Who's Who in the World of Puzzles---trace their inspiration to Martin Gardner's puzzle column in Scientific American and to his contributions to the world of recreational mathematics. Tribute to a Mathemagician contains an author index for the two previous books in the collection of books based on the Gatherings for Gardner. Sample puzzles and games include: - Tripos - Black Jack - Chinese ceramic puzzle vessels - Paper folding - Mongolian interlocking puzzles - Rolling block puzzles - Sliding puzzles - Cryptic crosswords - The Panex puzzle - Polyonimo puzzles - and more

The tradition of a publication based on the Gathering for Gardner continues with this new carefully selected and edited collection in which Martin Gardner and friends inspire and entertain. The contributors to this volume---virtually a list of Who's Who in the World of Puzzles---trace their inspiration to Martin Gardner's puzzle column in Scientific American and to his contributions to the world of recreational mathematics. Tribute to a Mathemagician contains an author index for the two previous books in the collection of books based on the Gatherings for Gardner. Sample puzzles and games include: - Tripos - Black Jack - Chinese ceramic puzzle vessels - Paper folding - Mongolian interlocking puzzles - Rolling block puzzles - Sliding puzzles - Cryptic crosswords - The Panex puzzle - Polyonimo puzzles - and more

What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences is a collection of articles highlighting some of the most recent developments in mathematics. These include important achievements in pure mathematics, as well as its fascinating applications. On the pure mathematics side, ``Prime Clusters and Gaps: Out-Experting the Experts'' talks about new insights into the distribution of prime numbers, the perpetual source of new problems, and new results. Recently, several mathematicians (including Yitang Zhang and James Maynard) significantly improved our knowledge of the distribution of prime numbers. Advances in the so-called Kadison-Singer problem and its applications in signal processing algorithms used to analyze and synthesize signals are described in ``The Kadison-Singer Problem: A Fine Balance''. ``Quod Erat Demonstrandum'' presents two examples of perseverance in mathematicians' pursuit of truth using, in particular, computers to verify their arguments. And ``Following in Sherlock Holmes' Bike Tracks'' shows how an episode in one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories about Sherlock Holmes naturally led to very interesting problems and results in the theory of completely integrable systems. On the applied side, ``Climate Past, Present, and Future'' shows the importance of mathematics in the study of climate change and global warming phenomena. Mathematical models help researchers to understand the past, present, and future changes of climate, and to analyze their consequences. ``The Truth Shall Set Your Fee'' talks about algorithms of information exchange in cyberspace. Economists have known for a long time that trust is a cornerstone of commerce, and this becomes even more important nowadays when a lot of transactions, big and small, are done over the Internet. Recent efforts of theoretical computer scientists led to the development of so-called ``rational protocols'' for information exchange, where the parties in the information exchange process find that lies do not pay off. Over the last 100 years many professional mathematicians and devoted amateurs contributed to the problem of finding polygons that can tile the plane, e.g., used as floor tiles in large rooms and walls. Despite all of these efforts, the search is not yet complete, as the very recent discovery of a new plane-tiling pentagon shows in ``A Pentagonal Search Pays Off''. Mathematics can benefit coaches and players in some of the most popular team sports as shown in ``The Brave New World of Sports Analytics''. The increased ability to collect and process statistics, big data, or ``analytics'' has completely changed the world of sports analytics. The use of modern methods of statistical modeling allows coaches and players to create much more detailed game plans as well as create many new ways of measuring a player's value. Finally, ``Origami: Unfolding the Future'' talks about the ancient Japanese paper-folding art and origami's unexpected connections to a variety of areas including mathematics, technology, and education.

The ""AMS"" series ""What's Happening in the Mathematical Sciences"" distills the amazingly rich brew of current research in mathematics down to a few choice samples. This volume leads off with an update on the Poincare Conjecture, a hundred-year-old problem that has apparently been solved by Grigory Perelman of St. Petersburg, Russia. So what did topologists do when the oldest and most famous problem about closed manifolds was vanquished? As the second chapter describes, they confronted a suite of problems concerning the 'ends' of open manifolds...and solved those, too. Not to be outdone, number theorists accomplished several unexpected feats in the first five years of the new century, from computing a trillion digits of pi to finding arbitrarily long equally-spaced sequences of prime numbers.Undergraduates made key discoveries, as explained in the chapters on Venn diagrams and primality testing. In applied mathematics, the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid mechanics continued to stir up interest. One team proved new theorems about the long-term evolution of vortices, while others explored the surprising ways that insects use vortices to move around. The random jittering of Brownian motion became a little less mysterious. Finally, an old and trusted algorithm of computer science had its trustworthiness explained in a novel way. Barry Cipra explains these new developments in his wry and witty style, familiar to readers of Volumes 1-5, and is joined in this volume by Dana Mackenzie. Volume 6 of ""What's Happening"" will convey to all readers - from mathematical novices to experts - the beauty and wonder that is mathematics.