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Wheels, Life, and Other Mathematical Amusements
Gathers mathematical puzzles, problems, games, and anecdotes about mathematical and scientific discoveries.
261 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 1983
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About the author
Martin Gardner
504 books511 followersMartin Gardner was an American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, literature (especially the writings of Lewis Carroll), philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion. He wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981, and published over 70 books.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 22, 2020
An interesting collection of his essays, though as others have noted not everyone will be interested in all the topics (I breezed through a few myself). While information on all these topics is readily available at the tap of a finger today, when this was published it was only in collections like these with their variety that one could be exposed to so many different "amusements" - number theory, card tricks, geometry problems both ancient and modern, combinatorics, and the new world of computer algorithms. My now passed-on friend bought this in hardcover in 1983, no doubt because he couldn't find all these things in one place anywhere else, and I'm sure he enjoyed all the topics.
June 13, 2010
This is clearly a man who enjoys his work. Gardner's enthusiasm leaps off the page in this scattershot collection of various puzzles and analyses of puzzles and addendums to the solutions to puzzles and analyses of puzzles. It provides insight into the mindset of puzzle enthusiasts, the kind of people who perform rigorous studies of 5x5 tic-tac-toe to prove or disprove the existence of a guaranteed draw for the second player (which, honestly, kind of ruins the fun...what point is there in playing it now?)
He devotes three entire chapters to the game of Life (the cellular automata simulation, that is, not the board game where you get a cash reward for each offspring you truck across the finish line). I had never thought that this particular computer diversion was so thoroughly researched and had such interesting and surprising emergent behavior.
This is the kind of work--establishing formal proofs, etc.--that borders the work of mathematicians and number theorists and it is a bit overwhelming when Gardner discusses certain problems that are as yet both unproven and for which a formal toolset to establish proof does not even exist. Further, some of the puzzle solutions actually have surprising practical applications (in pulsed radar and sonar codes, for Golomb rulers, for example). From that perspective it's difficult to categorize any of this as irrelevant navel-gazing by math nerds. These are the sort of details which I would have appreciated more of, and I'm not much of a puzzle freak and found the descent into minutia to be stultifyingly dull.
The chapters and their addendums reveal a small society of amateur enthusiasts--math nerds--who interacted or responded to Gardner's challenges and advanced the state of the art, by tightening the known best procedures or establishing small proofs. It suggests that research is both ongoing (there appears to be an infinity that we still just don't know) and that the work isn't nearly as "ivory tower" as I had thought.
He devotes three entire chapters to the game of Life (the cellular automata simulation, that is, not the board game where you get a cash reward for each offspring you truck across the finish line). I had never thought that this particular computer diversion was so thoroughly researched and had such interesting and surprising emergent behavior.
This is the kind of work--establishing formal proofs, etc.--that borders the work of mathematicians and number theorists and it is a bit overwhelming when Gardner discusses certain problems that are as yet both unproven and for which a formal toolset to establish proof does not even exist. Further, some of the puzzle solutions actually have surprising practical applications (in pulsed radar and sonar codes, for Golomb rulers, for example). From that perspective it's difficult to categorize any of this as irrelevant navel-gazing by math nerds. These are the sort of details which I would have appreciated more of, and I'm not much of a puzzle freak and found the descent into minutia to be stultifyingly dull.
The chapters and their addendums reveal a small society of amateur enthusiasts--math nerds--who interacted or responded to Gardner's challenges and advanced the state of the art, by tightening the known best procedures or establishing small proofs. It suggests that research is both ongoing (there appears to be an infinity that we still just don't know) and that the work isn't nearly as "ivory tower" as I had thought.
April 27, 2015
Not as many of interest to me in this one. I programmed Life in BASIC back in 1977, and moved on after the curiosity wore off - plus I had my fill with Wolfram in his tome. And...we ran through NIM stuff around the same time, so less interested now. Chess problems...cool. Geometry. Cards. Lots of puzzles... And no matter how much I read of his, I can never fathom the resources he had. Obscure texts, mainstream journals...in a pre-Internet ubiquitously available age. Amazing.
August 4, 2010
Martin Gardner è una certezza... In questo libro sono notevoli i capitoli sul NIM e sul gioco Life di Conway. E tante altre pagine su tanti altri problemi e giochi matematici.
December 14, 2013
Worth it for the chapter on Conway's Life alone, but there are plenty of other treasures here as well.
May 29, 2016
the second chapter on Fermat's Last Theorem is fascinating
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews