Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
This book is a treasure chest of math puzzles and games. Can you move a knight to every square of a chessboard? Can you solve the puzzle of the seven bridges, or arrange numbers in a magic square? Rouse Ball was a teacher at Cambridge who collected these problems for fun. Some are hundreds of years old, and people still play with them today. Math, it turns out, can be a game.
Rouse Ball taught mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and wrote a respected history of the subject. He also believed recreation belonged inside mathematics, not outside it, and gathered problems that had entertained thinkers for centuries. First published in 1892, the book was revised repeatedly during his life and long after, growing into the standard collection of its kind.
The recreations range over arithmetic and geometry puzzles, river crossings, mazes, the knight's tour, magic squares, and the Chinese tangram. Ball gives solutions and history together, so each problem arrives with its story. The essays in the second half treat larger themes, including the development of mathematical ideas, mechanical inventions, and pastimes like string figures from around the world.
Generations of mathematicians first fell in love with the subject through books like this one, and modern puzzle culture descends from it directly. Some notation is dated, but the problems are immortal and need nothing beyond patience and a pencil. Readers who enjoy crosswords, chess problems, or clever questions of any kind will find hours of pleasure here.
W. W. Rouse Ball, a Cambridge mathematics tutor, published Mathematical Recreations and Essays in 1892 for readers who love problems as much as proofs. Its first half tours famous puzzles, mazes, chessboard problems, and number tricks, while the essays that follow survey topics from the history of mathematics to string figures. The book offers a cabinet of curiosities for the mathematical mind: playful, scholarly, and endlessly browsable.
Mathematical Recreations and Essays began in 1892 as a Cambridge don's pastime: W. W. Rouse Ball, historian of mathematics and tutor at Trinity, collected the problems that mathematicians tell one another for pleasure. The book went through edition after edition for half a century, later revised by H. S. M. Coxeter, and became the standard English anthology of mathematical play.
It has lasted because its contents never age. The seven bridges of Königsberg, the tower puzzle, magic squares, the knight's tour, river crossings, and the fifteen puzzle are all here with their histories and solutions, followed by essays ranging from the history of the subject to string figures and mechanical toys. Much of modern recreational mathematics, including the career of Martin Gardner, traces back to this volume's example that play is a serious way into deep structures.
A first reader should browse rather than march: open where a heading catches the eye, keep a pencil and scrap paper at hand, and expect some Victorian notation to slow the occasional page. No advanced training is assumed. The book rewards exactly the curiosity it was written to reward.
Edition: Fourth edition, 1905. Formulas are written out in plain text; figures and grids are not carried. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 26839.
The first chapter
In this edition I have inserted in the earlier chapters descriptions of several additional Recreations involving elementary mathematics, and I have added in the second part chapters on the History of the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge, Mersenne's Numbers, and Cryptography and Ciphers.
It is with some hesitation that I include in the book the chapters on Astrology and Ciphers, for these subjects are only remotely connected with Mathematics, but to afford myself some latitude I have altered the title of the second part to Miscellaneous Essays and Problems.
W.W.R.B.
0=Trinity College, Cambridge. 1= to013 May, 1905. 0 1
mainstuff
"Les hommes ne sont jamais plus ingénieux que dans l'invention des jeux; l'esprit s'y trouve à son aise. Après les jeux qui dépendent uniquement des nombres viennent les jeux où entre la situation. Après les jeux où n'entrent que le nombre et la situation viendraient les jeux où entre le mouvement. Enfin il serait a souhaiter qu'on eût un cours entier des jeux, traités mathématiquement." -1000 (Leibnitz: letter to De Montmort, July 29, 1715.)
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1892. Author died 1925. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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