Mathematical Journeys

A colorful tour through the intriguing world of mathematics

Take a grand tour of the best of modern math, its most elegant solutions, most clever discoveries, most mind-bending propositions, and most impressive personalities. Writing with a light touch while showing the real mathematics, author Peter Schumer introduces you to the history of mathematics, number theory, combinatorics, geometry, graph theory, and "recreational mathematics." Requiring only high school math and a healthy curiosity, Mathematical Journeys helps you explore all those aspects of math that mathematicians themselves find most delightful. You’ll discover brilliant, sometimes quirky and humorous tidbits like how to compute the digits of pi, the Josephus problem, mathematical amusements such as Nim and Wythoff’s game, pizza slicing, and clever twists on rolling dice.

PETER D. SCHUMER, PhD, is a professor of mathematics at Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont. Dr. Schumer is a well-known writer and lecturer as well as a popular educator on both mathematics and the game of go–and a recipient of the Trevor Evans Award of the Mathematical Association of America. He received his PhD in 1983 from the University of Maryland and has been a visiting scholar at Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, and Keio University in Japan.