What I've been reading
Jul. 27th, 2010 10:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sarahmichiganI've already talked about what I've been reading in previous posts, but I've now finished them both up.
"Slowing Down to the Speed of Life" by Richard Carlson and Joseph Bailey is always good for a re-read when I'm feeling anxious. Living in the moment has a lot to do with mental health.
and
"Ancient Puzzles: Classic Brainteasers and Other Timeless Mathematical Games of the Past 10 Centuries" by Dominic Olivastro. I talked about the Ishango Bone and Tangrams in this post.
Here are handful of more interesting concepts, people, etc. I discovered while reading the book:
-The concept behind magic squares can go from two dimensions to three and will still work. You can even make a magic tesseract. And Ben Franklin was a master of magic squares and could create really huge ones almost as fast as he could write the numbers down. And Franklin's squares tended to have special qualities and patterns in them.
-I found the bits on Leonardo of Pisa, also known as Fibonacci, to be quite interesting. He spread the Indian/Arabic number system to Europe and didn't discover but did popularize the Fibonacci sequence.
-Archimedes' "cattle problem" is sometimes called "Archimedes' revenge" because he took an extant puzzle and made it so difficult that the number of cattle in the answer couldn't fit between the earth and the sun even if the cattle were all the size of atoms.
-I also learned about graceful graphs and Euler walks. I didn't realize that the children's game I used to play in grade school was based on related theories. You try to draw a house-like figure without retracing any of your steps. It's similar to the second graphic on this page.
-ETA: Oh, how could I forget Persian Muslim mathematician Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi who gave us the word algorithm and the word algebra!
Also, I haven't been able to find contact info for the author online, so I wrote him a snail mail in care of his publisher to ask about one problem I had a hard time following. I'm not expecting an answer, but it'd be cool if I did get one. I'm not even sure he's still alive since he was most active in publishing in the late 80s and early 90s.
More comments on both books (and a list of how I'm doing on my 50 books in 2010 challenge) here.
"Slowing Down to the Speed of Life" by Richard Carlson and Joseph Bailey is always good for a re-read when I'm feeling anxious. Living in the moment has a lot to do with mental health.
and
"Ancient Puzzles: Classic Brainteasers and Other Timeless Mathematical Games of the Past 10 Centuries" by Dominic Olivastro. I talked about the Ishango Bone and Tangrams in this post.
Here are handful of more interesting concepts, people, etc. I discovered while reading the book:
-The concept behind magic squares can go from two dimensions to three and will still work. You can even make a magic tesseract. And Ben Franklin was a master of magic squares and could create really huge ones almost as fast as he could write the numbers down. And Franklin's squares tended to have special qualities and patterns in them.
-I found the bits on Leonardo of Pisa, also known as Fibonacci, to be quite interesting. He spread the Indian/Arabic number system to Europe and didn't discover but did popularize the Fibonacci sequence.
-Archimedes' "cattle problem" is sometimes called "Archimedes' revenge" because he took an extant puzzle and made it so difficult that the number of cattle in the answer couldn't fit between the earth and the sun even if the cattle were all the size of atoms.
-I also learned about graceful graphs and Euler walks. I didn't realize that the children's game I used to play in grade school was based on related theories. You try to draw a house-like figure without retracing any of your steps. It's similar to the second graphic on this page.
-ETA: Oh, how could I forget Persian Muslim mathematician Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi who gave us the word algorithm and the word algebra!
Also, I haven't been able to find contact info for the author online, so I wrote him a snail mail in care of his publisher to ask about one problem I had a hard time following. I'm not expecting an answer, but it'd be cool if I did get one. I'm not even sure he's still alive since he was most active in publishing in the late 80s and early 90s.
More comments on both books (and a list of how I'm doing on my 50 books in 2010 challenge) here.
