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The Penguin book of Curious and Interesting Mathematics.
David Wells:
A collection of strange mathematical facts and stories.This anthology covers a whole range of ages, Maths and Mathematicians.
Included: probability paradoxes, jumbled Shakespearean sonnets, record-breaking monkeys and typewriters, and theories of big game hunting.
Also featured are stories of people who looked for logical loopholes in the American Constitution.
Charles Babbage and the Curious Computer.
Fiona Veitch Smith.
One ordinary meeting of the science club at Parkview Primary School becomes extraordinary when their teacher takes them back in time to 1843 to meet Christian inventor Charles Babbage.
This book presents a delightful alternate reality in which Lovelace and Babbage build the Difference Engine and use it to create runaway economic models, battle the scourge of spelling errors, explore the wider realms of mathematics and, or course, fight crime. Extremely funny and utterly unusual.
The Code Book.
The Secret history of Codes and Code-breaking.Simon Singh brings life to an astonishing story of puzzles, codes, languages and riddles that reveals man’s continual pursuit to disguise and uncover, and to work out the secret languages of others.
Codes have influenced events throughout history, both in the stories of those who make them and those who break them. The betrayal of Mary Queen of Scots and the cracking of the enigma code that helped the Allies in WWII are major episodes in a continuing history of cryptography. Simon also investigates other codes, the unravelling of genes and the rediscovery of ancient languages.
Alex’s Adventures in Numberand.
Alex Bellows explodes the myth that maths is best left to the geeks, and demonstrates the remarkable ways it’s linked to our everyday lives. He shines a light on the mathematical patterns in nature and on the peculiar predictability of random behaviour.
He eats a potato crisp whose revolutionary shape was unpalatable to the ancient Greeks, and he shows the deep connections between maths, religion and philosophy. From the world’s fastest mental calculators in Germany to numerologists in the US desert, these dispatches in Numberland are an unlikely but exhilarating cocktail of reportage and mathematical history.
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