____________
How do you apply game theory to select who should be on your Christmas shopping list ? Can you predict Her Majesty''s Christmas Message? Will calculations show Santa is getting steadily thinner - shimmying up and down chimneys for a whole night - or fatter - as he tucks into a mince pie and a glass of sherry in billions of houses across the world?
Full of diagrams, sketches and graphs, beautiful equations, Markov chains and matrices, The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus brightens up the bleak midwinter with stockingfuls of mathematical marvels. And proves once and for all that maths isn''t just for old men with white hair and beards who associate with elves.
Maths has never been merrier.
NOW WITH A BRAND NEW CHAPTER
Thomas Oléron Evans, PhD is a Teaching Fellow for the Smart Cities and Spatial Data Courses at the University College London.
Hannah Fry, PhD is a broadcaster and lecturer of the Mathematics of Cities at the University College London. She is the author of The Mathematics of Love, and her TED talk on the subject has been viewed over five million times. She regularly appears on BBC television and radio.