The last recreations: hydras, eggs, and other mathematical mystifications

Martin Gardner0387949291, 9780387949291

More than any of his other writing, Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Games column in Scientific American cemented his reputation as America’s premier writer on recreational mathematics and set the standard for the genre. What’s remarkable about Gardner’s career is that while he remained unfailingly lucid and entertaining, the mathematical ideas he was able to make understandable to a lay audience gradually grew in depth and sophistication. Yet he has never lost his light touch. The Last Recreations collects Gardner’s columns from the last seven years before his retirement from the magazine in 1986. As always in his published collections, Gardner includes letters received from readers commenting on the ideas presented in his columns, as well as his own updates and commentaries.
In The Wonders of a Planiverse, we read about A.K. Dewdney’s remarkable explorations in Flatlandthe land of two dimensionsas well as readers’ comments on Flatland’s implications for subjects ranging from relativity to firearm design. Taxicab Geometry explores the bizarre properties of a surprisingly simple form of non-Euclidian geometry. Fun with Eggs delves into the rich history of lore and methods of egg balancing. One of the readers’ replies tells how to get hens to lay eggs with personalized notes inside. There are twenty other essays, on subjects ranging from prime numbers to checkers to the mathematics of voting, each more amusing and fascinating than the last.
This book is classic Martin Gardner, doing what he does better than anyone else.

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Table of contents :
HOME……Page 1
CONTENTS……Page 7
Preface……Page 6
The Wonders of a Planiverse……Page 9
Bulgarian Solitaire and Other Seemingly Endless Tasks……Page 34
Fun with Eggs, Part I……Page 51
Fun with Eggs, Part I1……Page 65
The Topology of Knots……Page 72
M-Pire Maps……Page 90
Directed Graphs and Cannibals……Page 108
Dinner Guests, Schoolgirls, and Handcuffed Prisoners……Page 128
The Monster and Other Sporadic Groups……Page 146
Taxicab Geometry……Page 165
The Power of the Pigeonhole……Page 182
Strong Laws of Small Primes……Page 196
Checker Recreations, Part I……Page 211
Checker Recreations, Part I1……Page 225
Modulo Arithmetic and Hummer’s Wicked Witch……Page 237
Lavinia Seeks a Room and Other Problems……Page 250
The Symmetry Creations of Scott Kim……Page 270
Parabolas……Page 288
Non-Euclidean Geometry……Page 305
Voting Mathematics……Page 318
A Toroidal Paradox and Other Problems……Page 332
Minimal Steiner Trees……Page 345
Trivalent Graphs, Snarks, and Boojums……Page 361
Index……Page 380