Five-Minute Mathematics

How much math can you cover in five minutes? Quite a bit, if you have a good guide. In this collection of one hundred short essays, Ehrhard Behrends offers a tour through contemporary and everyday mathematics. The topics range from pure mathematics to applications of mathematics to observations about the mathematics that surrounds us in daily life. Here, we read about the parable of grains of rice on a chessboard, the mathematics of the lottery, music and mathematics, intriguing paradoxes, the concept of infinity, the Poincare conjecture, quantum computers, and plenty more. Anyone who regularly reads the science section of a newspaper or magazine will find much to enjoy in Five-Minute Mathematics. Behrends makes very few assumptions about his readers, other than general curiosity and some familiarity with high school mathematics. The vignettes originally appeared in the author's newspaper column. They have been extensively revised and expanded, and provided with attractive illustrations and photographs.