The Magical Maze: Seeing the World Through Mathematical Eyes

This book takes the reader on a journey through areas of maths that are not touched on before university- how mathemticians explore the underlying symmetries and structures of a problem to come up with an elegant solution or try and tame ugly, unpredictable systems. It assumes little prior knowledge, yet can be pretty heavygoing in places. This is not a criticism of the work; the topics of chaos, fractals, probability, networks and Turing tests is not easy to explain without getting 'heavy'. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has some knowledge of maths and wants to know what 'real mathematicians' do.

I read this in between other things, in a Kindle edition that came free from Amazon.

This is something unusual: a book about mathematics which is aimed at a general audience but doesn't restrict itself to trivia. So it's a satisfying read for somebody like me, a non-mathematician who nevertheless has had more than a basic exposure to the subject and who continues to take an interest in it at more than a superficial level. That's a gap that there's all too little on the shelves to fill. Though there are few heavy formulae here, Professor Stewart probes more deeply into his material than most.

It follows that those without a mathematical background looking for an overview might find it heavy going. Not that I'd want to put anybody off who show more wants to make the effort – it's well worth while. show less

I read this in between other things, in a Kindle edition that came free from Amazon.

This is something unusual: a book about mathematics which is aimed at a general audience but doesn't restrict itself to trivia. So it's a satisfying read for somebody like me, a non-mathematician who nevertheless has had more than a basic exposure to the subject and who continues to take an interest in it at more than a superficial level. That's a gap that there's all too little on the shelves to fill. Though there are few heavy formulae here, Professor Stewart probes more deeply into his material than most.

It follows that those without a mathematical background looking for an overview might find it heavy going. Not that I'd want to put anybody off who show more wants to make the effort – it's well worth while. show less

Covers a lot of ground in a fun way: chaos theory, NP-completeness, graph theory.