scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1014067
Here is an up-dated and revised version of the author's 1989 edition [W. H. Freeman, New York] of this valuable book. He continues to write expository items on deep, broad and seminal ideas of mathematical science. Indeed, Gardner was awarded the 1997 Forum Award by the American Physical Society. He is a mathematical realist in the tradition of C. S. Peirce and Roger Penrose. The material consists of a revised collection of Scientific American columns he wrote in the area of recreational mathematics. Special emphasis is given to revisions on the subjects of the French Oulipo, Penrose tilings and public-key cryptosystems. Indeed, bibliographies on several topics have been up-dated to about 1996. There is a broad spectrum of interesting topics which include: Mandelbrot's fractals, Conway's surreal numbers, Penrose tiling, the Oulipo, Wythoff's Nim, Mathematical induction, trapdoor ciphers, Ramsey theory and Smullyan's logic puzzles, The discussions are always amusing and enlightening. E.g., there is mention (pp. 85-86) of Queneauls transformation of Hilbert's axioms of geometry in which ``points, ``lines, and ``planes are changed to literary objects of ``words, ``phrases, and ``paragraphs. Further there are several presentations on palindromic poetry by the French Oulipo (p. 81), but no mention of such complex objects as palindromic sonnets and palindromic villanelles. Along the same lines, imagine a sonnet which backwards is a different sonnet! On p. 145, there is a neat treatment of the serious logical flaw in the so-called ``monstrous paradox discovered by E. Schrödinger and popularized by J. E. Littlewood. Most satisfying is the discussion (pp. 190-191) of the use of bi-composites in RSA cryptosystems to encrypt and decrypt important messages. However, there is a non-trivial error on p. 197, where Gardner claims \((2^{521}-1)\) is tri-composite, when it is prime. All in all, I found the paperback delightful and packed with useful and unique information.
- Fractal tilings based on successive adjacent substitution rule
- The mysterious Mr. Ammann
- Paper Pentasia: an aperiodic surface in modular origami
- Computational aspects of M. C. Escher's ribbon patterns
- Nonexpansive directions in the Jeandel-Rao Wang shift
- Discontinuities of the Integrated Density of States for Laplacians Associated with Penrose and Ammann–Beenker Tilings
- Repeatedly applying the combinatorial Nullstellensatz for zero-sum grids to Martin Gardner's minimum no-3-in-a-line problem
- Enforce and selective operators of combinatorial games
This page was built for publication:
Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q4337936)
