Carefully selected highlights of the Bay Area Math Adventures (BAMA), a lecture series for high school students.

Many mathematicians have been drawn to mathematics through their experience with math circles. The Berkeley Math Circle (BMC) started in 1998 as one of the very first math circles in the U.S. Over the last decade and a half, 100 instructors--university professors, business tycoons, high school teachers, and more--have shared their passion for mathematics by delivering over 800 BMC sessions on the UC Berkeley campus every week during the school year. This second volume of the book series is based on a dozen of these sessions, encompassing a variety of enticing and stimulating mathematical topics, some new and some continuing from Volume I: from dismantling Rubik's Cube and randomly putting it back together to solving it with the power of group theory;from raising knot-eating machines and letting Alexander the Great cut the Gordian Knot to breaking through knot theory via the Jones polynomial;from entering a seemingly hopeless infinite raffle to becoming friendly with multiplicative functions in the land of Dirichlet, Möbius, and Euler;from leading an army of jumping fleas in an old problem from the International Mathematical Olympiads to improving our own essay-writing strategies;from searching for optimal paths on a hot summer day to questioning whether Archimedes was on his way to discovering trigonometry 2000 years ago Do some of these scenarios sound bizarre, having never before been associated with mathematics? Mathematicians love having fun while doing serious mathematics and that love is what this book intends to share with the reader. Whether at a beginner, an intermediate, or an advanced level, anyone can find a place here to be provoked to think deeply and to be inspired to create. In the interest of fostering a greater awareness and appreciation of mathematics and its connections to other disciplines and everyday life, MSRI and the AMS are publishing books in the Mathematical Circles Library series as a service to young people, their parents and teachers, and the mathematics profession. Titles in this series are co-published with the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI).

A companion to Mathematical Apocrypha (published in 2002) this second volume of anecdotes, stories, quips, and ruminations about mathematics and mathematicians is sure to please. It differs from other books of its type in that many of the stories are from the twentieth century and many about currently living mathematicians. A number of the best stories come from the author's first-hand experience. The writing is lively, engaging, and informative. There are stories the reader may wish to share with students and colleagues, friends, and relatives. The purpose of the book is to explore and to celebrate the many facets of mathematical life. The stories reveal mathematicians as intense, human, and sympathetic. They should resonate with readers everywhere. This book will appeal to students from high school through graduate school, to faculty and mathematical scientists of all stripes, and also to physicists, engineer, and anyone interested in mathematics.

This book contains 500 problems that range over a wide spectrum of areas of high school mathematics and levels of difficulty. Some are simple mathematical puzzlers while others are serious problems at the Olympiad level. Students of all levels of interest and ability will be entertained and taught by the book. For many problems, more than one solution is supplied so that students can see how different approaches can be taken to a problem and compare the elegance and efficiency of different tools that might be applied. Teachers at both the college and secondary levels will find the book useful, both for encouraging their students and for their own pleasure. Some of the problems can be used to provide a little spice in the regular curriculum by demonstrating the power of very basic techniques. This collection provides a solid base for students who wish to enter competitions at the Olympiad level. They can begin with easy problems and progress to more demanding ones. A special mathematical tool chest summarizes the results and techniques needed by competition-level students.

The Early Mathematics of Leonhard Euler gives an article-by-article description of Leonhard Euler's early mathematical works; the 50 or so mathematical articles he wrote before he left St. Petersburg in 1741 to join the Academy of Frederick the Great in Berlin. These early pieces contain some of Euler's greatest work, the Konigsberg bridge problem, his solution to the Basel problem, and his first proof of the Euler-Fermat theorem. It also presents important results that we seldom realize are due to Euler; that mixed partial derivatives are (usually) equal, our f(x) f(x) notation, and the integrating factor in differential equations. The books shows how contributions in diverse fields are related, how number theory relates to series, which, in turn, relate to elliptic integrals and then to differential equations. There are dozens of such strands in this beautiful web of mathematics. At the same time, we see Euler grow in power and sophistication, from a young student when at 18 he published his first work on differential equations (a paper with a serious flaw) to the most celebrated mathematician and scientist of his time. It is a portrait of the world's most exciting mathematics between 1725 and 1741, rich in technical detail, woven with connections within Euler's work and with the work of other mathematicians in other times and places, laced with historical context.

Mathematical ideas with aesthetic appeal for any mathematically minded person.