This excellent book, written by the established author David Acheson, makes mathematics accessible to everyone. Providing an entertaining and witty overview of the subject, the text includes several fascinating puzzles, and is accompanied by numerous illustrations and sketches by world famouscartoonists. This unusual book is one of the most readable explanations of mathematics available.

"[Acheson] introduces the fundamental ideas of calculus through the story of how the subject developed, from approximating π to imaginary numbers, and from Newton's falling apple to the vibrations of an electric guitar."--Back cover

How can we be sure that Pythagoras's theorem is really true? Why is the 'angle in a semicircle' always 90 degrees? And how can tangents help determine the speed of a bullet? David Acheson takes the reader on a highly illustrated tour through the history of geometry, from ancient Greece to the present day. He emphasizes throughout elegant deduction and practical applications, and argues that geometry can offer the quickest route to the whole spirit of mathematics at its best. Along the way, we encounter the quirky and the unexpected, meet the great personalities involved, and uncover some of the loveliest surprises in mathematics.

This treatment covers the mechanics of writing proofs, the area and circumference of circles, and complex numbers and their application to real numbers. 1998 edition.

Ann von Lossberg and boyfriend Jim Hudock stand at the dock at Baltimore harbor and wave goodbye to their screaming-red VW bus en route to England--just about the most beautiful magic carpet Ive ever seen, Ann says. Quitting their jobs and selling their possessions, they travel around the world with no fixed itinerarypresuming that their odyssey will be no less magical than Ali Babas classical odyssey. The first overland trip, two and a half years, is to the Middle East and Africa; a second trip to Asia is thirteen months. Extended travel peels away the layers of your former self, especially the demands of Africa, Ann says. Something happens when you give up wearing a watch and relinquish control over time. Experience found us; extraordinary things that just dont happen to people happened to us. We learned to leap, and the net always appeared. The language that filled Anns journals, seasoning over twenty-five years time to become the sixteen stories of 1089 Nights, gives way to something rich and transcendent. A sympathetic storyteller with a keen eyemost commonly the lone woman traveler among menAnn provides us with an armchair view of the world without the mosquitoes. From Syria to Mozambique to Cambodia, over and over, this heartening memoir shows us that the world is a wondrous place, that travel can change us, satisfy something soulful, and promote the most personal kind of peace. 1089 Nights is a passionate love affair with the world that carries an urgent plea. The world passes us by faster than we know. If we dont catch it soon, the airwaves will immutably wash over us in the same likeness. We will become as one. Hurry, Ann says, the camels are waiting.

Provides information on numbers and what makes particular ones noteworthy