This volume collects many of the columns Keith Devlin wrote for The Guardian.

Collection of stories about famous contemporary mathematicians, with illustrations.

The Golden Section has played a part since antiquity in many parts of geometry, architecture, music, art and philosophy. However, it also appears in the newer domains of technology and fractals. This book aims both to describe examples of the Golden Section, and to show some paths to further developments.

This is an introduction to recent developments in algebraic combinatorics and an illustration of how research in mathematics actually progresses. The author recounts the story of the search for and discovery of a proof of a formula conjectured in the late 1970s: the number of n x n alternating sign matrices, objects that generalize permutation matrices. While apparent that the conjecture must be true, the proof was elusive. Researchers became drawn to this problem, making connections to aspects of invariant theory, to symmetric functions, to hypergeometric and basic hypergeometric series, and, finally, to the six-vertex model of statistical mechanics. All these threads are brought together in Zeilberger's 1996 proof of the original conjecture. The book is accessible to anyone with a knowledge of linear algebra. Students will learn what mathematicians actually do in an interesting and new area of mathematics, and even researchers in combinatorics will find something new here.

How Euler Did It is a collection of 40 monthly columns that appeared on MAA Online between November 2003 and February 2007 about the mathematical and scientific work of the great 18th-century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. Inside we find interesting stories about Euler's work in geometry and his solution to Cramer's paradox and its role in the early days of linear algebra. We see Euler's first proof of Fermat's little theorem for which he used mathematical induction, as well as his discovery of over a hundred pairs of amicable numbers, and his work on odd perfect numbers, about which little is known even today. Professor Sandifer based his columns on Euler's own words in the original language in which they were written. In this way, the author was able to uncover many details that are not found in other sources.