Five-Minute Mathematics

Behrends, Ehrhard

doi:10.1090/mbk/053

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Five-Minute Mathematics

About this Title

Ehrhard Behrends, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany. Translated by David Kramer

Publication: Miscellaneous Books
Publication Year: 2008; Volume 53
ISBNs: 978-0-8218-4348-2 (print); 978-1-4704-2484-8 (online)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1090/mbk/053
MathSciNet review: MR2402654
MSC: Primary 00A05; Secondary 00A08

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Chapter 1. You can’t beat the odds
Chapter 2. Magical mathematics: The integers
Chapter 3. How old is the captain?
Chapter 4. Vertiginously large prime numbers
Chapter 5. Loss plus loss equals win
Chapter 6. When it comes to large numbers, intuition fails
Chapter 7. The key for encryption is the telephone book
Chapter 8. The village barber who shaves himself
Chapter 9. Quit while you’re ahead?
Chapter 10. Can a monkey create great literature?
Chapter 11. The birthday paradox
Chapter 12. Horror vacui
Chapter 13. Sufficient difficulties with the logic of mathematics are in fact a necessity
Chapter 14. To change or not to change? The Monty Hall problem
Chapter 15. In Hilbert’s Hotel there is always a vacancy
Chapter 16. That fascinating number pi
Chapter 17. How random events become calculable quantities
Chapter 18. A one-million-dollar prize: How are the prime numbers distributed?
Chapter 19. The five-dimensional cake
Chapter 20. One night stand
Chapter 21. Fly me to the Moon
Chapter 22. Using residues
Chapter 23. Top secret!
Chapter 24. Magical mathematics: Order amidst chaos
Chapter 25. How does one approach genius?
Chapter 26. On semitones and twelfth roots
Chapter 27. Why am I always standing in the wrong line?
Chapter 28. Zero: An undeservedly underrated number
Chapter 29. I love to count!
Chapter 30. Genius autodidact: The Indian mathematician Ramanujan
Chapter 31. I hate mathematics because...
Chapter 32. The traveling salesman: A modern odyssey
Chapter 33. Squaring the circle
Chapter 34. A step into the infinite
Chapter 35. Mathematics in your CD player
Chapter 36. The logarithm: A dying breed
Chapter 37. Prizeworthy mathematics
Chapter 38. Why axioms of all things?
Chapter 39. Proof by computer?
Chapter 40. The lottery: The small prizes
Chapter 41. Formulas = concentrated thought
Chapter 42. Endless growth
Chapter 43. How do quanta compute?
Chapter 44. Extremes!
Chapter 45. Infinitely small?
Chapter 46. Mathematical observations at the fire department
Chapter 47. The first mathematical proof is 2,500 years old
Chapter 48. There is transcendence in mathematics, though it has nothing to do with mysticism
Chapter 49. Is every even number the sum of two primes?
Chapter 50. Why we invert conditional probabilities incorrectly
Chapter 51. Millionaire or billionaire?
Chapter 52. Mathematics and chess
Chapter 53. “The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics”
Chapter 54. The search for Mersenne primes
Chapter 55. Berlin, eighteenth century: A beatuful formula is discovered
Chapter 56. The first really complicated number
Chapter 57. P = NP: In mathematics, is luck sometimes unnecessary?
Chapter 58. Happy 32nd birthday!
Chapter 59. Buffon’s needle
Chapter 60. Running hot and cold: Controlled cooling solves optimization problems
Chapter 61. Who didn’t pay?
Chapter 62. What can statistics tell us?
Chapter 63. Arbitrage
Chapter 64. Farewell to risk: Options
Chapter 65. Is mathematics a reflection of the world?
Chapter 66. Mathematics that you can hear
Chapter 67. Chance as composer
Chapter 68. Do dice have a guilty conscience?
Chapter 69. Strawberry ice cream can kill you!
Chapter 70. Prosperity for all
Chapter 71. No risk, thank you!
Chapter 72. A Nobel Prize in mathematics?
Chapter 73. Chance as reckoner: Monte Carlo methods
Chapter 74. Fuzzy logic
Chapter 75. Secret messages in the Bible?
Chapter 76. How knotted can a knot be?
Chapter 77. How much mathematics does a person need?
Chapter 78. Big, bigger, biggest
Chapter 79. It is probably correct
Chapter 80. Is the world a crooked place?
Chapter 81. Is there a mathematical bureau of standards?
Chapter 82. The butterfly that fluttered by
Chapter 83. Guaranteed to make you rich
Chapter 84. Don’t trust anyone over thirty
Chapter 85. Equality in mathematics
Chapter 86. Magical invariants
Chapter 87. Mathematics goes to the movies
Chapter 88. The lazy eight: Infinity
Chapter 89. Books need bigger margins!
Chapter 90. Visualizing internal organs with mathematics
Chapter 91. A brain in the computer
Chapter 92. Cogito, ergo sum
Chapter 93. Does the world have a hole?
Chapter 94. Complex numbers are not so complex as their name suggests
Chapter 95. M. C. Escher and infinity
Chapter 96. A one at the beginning is much more likely than a two
Chapter 97. The Leipzig town hall and the sunflower
Chapter 98. Information optimally packaged
Chapter 99. Four colors suffice!
Chapter 100. Mathematics makes billionaires

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Five-Minute Mathematics

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