Alex's Adventures in Numberland - Alex Bellos [182]
Slocum, J., The Tangram Book, Sterling, New York, 2001
Slocum, J., and Sonneveld, D., The 15 Puzzle, Slocum Puzzle Foundation, California, 2006
Swetz, F.J., Legacy of the Luoshu, Open Court, Chicago, IL, 2002
Dudeney, H., ‘Perplexities’, column in Strand Magazine, London, 1910–30
Singmaster, D., ‘The unreasonable utility of recreational mathematics’, lecture at the First European Congress of Mathematics, Paris, July 1992
CHAPTER SEVEN
The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (www.research.att.com/~njas/ sequences/) looks quite daunting at first to the non-specialist, but once you get the hang of it, is fascinating to surf. I found Chris Caldwell’s online encyclopedia of primes, The Prime Pages (www.primes.utm.edu) an excellent resource.
Doxiadis, A., Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture, Faber & Faber, London, 2000
du Sautoy, M., The Music of the Primes, Fourth Estate, London, 2003
Reid, C., From Zero to Infinity, Thomas Y. Crowell, New York, 1955
Schmelzer, T., and Baillie, R., ‘Summing a curious, slowly convergent series’, American Mathematical Monthly, July 2008
Sloane, N.J.A., ‘My Favorite Integer Sequences’, 2000
CHAPTER EIGHT
It’s a curious quirk that pi, phi and Fibonacci sound related when their etymologies are all completely different, although conspiracy theorists might not be convinced. Separating the cranks from the non-cranks when it comes to the golden ratio is not always easy. One definite non-crank is Ron Knott, whose website: www.computing.surrey.ac.uk/personal/ext/ R.Knott/Fibonacci/ has all you ever wanted to know about 1.618…
Livio, M., The Golden Ratio, Review, London, 2002
Posamentier, A.S., and Lehmann, I., The (Fabulous) Fibonacci Numbers, Prometheus Books, New York, 2007
McManus, I.C., Cook, R., and Hunt, A., ‘Beyond the Golden Section and normative aesthetics: why do individuals differ so much in their aesthetic preferences for rectangles?’, Perception, vol. 36, 2007
CHAPTER NINE
The Kelly strategy is a lot more than just remembering the fraction , since gambling situations are usually more complex than the very simple one I described. I apologize to Ed Thorp, who asked hopefully during our interview if I would be able to spell out Kelly in proper detail. Sorry, Ed, it’s just too complicated for the scope of this book! William Poundstone’s terrific book was a guiding light and I’m grateful he supplied me with data for the graph chapter 9.
Aczel, A.D., Chance, High Stakes, London, 2005
Bennett, D.J., Randomness, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998
Devlin, K., The Unfinished Game, Basic Books, New York, 2008
Haigh, J., Taking Chances, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999
Kaplan, M., and Kaplan, E., Chances Are, Penguin, New York, 2006
Mlodinow, L., The Drunkard’s Walk, Allen Lane, London, 2008
Paulos, J.A., Innumeracy, Hill & Wang, New York, 1988
Poundstone, W., Fortune’s Formula, Hill & Wang, New York, 2005
Rosenthal, J.S., Struck by Lightning, Joseph Henry Press, Washington DC, 2001
Thorp, E.O., Beat the Dealer, Vintage, New York, 1966
Tijms, H., Understanding Probability, Cambridge University Press, 2007
Venn, J., The Logic of Chance, Macmillan, London, 1888
CHAPTER TEN
Statistics is the one field of maths covered in this book that I never studied at school or college, so much of this was very new to me. Some mathematicians don’t even consider statistics proper maths, occupied as it is with messy things like measurement. I enjoyed getting my hands dirty, although I’m not going back to Greggs for a very long time.
Blastland, M., and Dilnot, A., The Tiger That Isn’t, Profile, London, 2007
Brookes, M., Extreme Measures, Bloomsbury, London, 2004
Cline Cohen, P., A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America, University of Chicago Press, IL, 1982
Cohen, I. B., The Triumph of Numbers, W. W. Norton, New York, 2005
Edwards, A.W.F., Pascal’s Arithmetical Triangle, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1987
Kuper S., and Szymanski S., Why England Lose, HarperCollins, London, 2009
Taleb,