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The zen of magic squares, circles, and stars
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The zen of magic squares, circles, and stars

The zen of magic squares, circles, and stars

Clifford A. Pickover

418 pages, parution le 15/01/2003

Résumé

Humanity's love affair with mathematics and mysticism reached a critical juncture, legend has it, on the back of a turtle in ancient China. As Clifford Pickover briefly recounts in this enthralling book, the most comprehensive in decades on magic squares, Emperor Yu was supposedly strolling along the Yellow River one day around 2200 B.C. when he spotted the creature: its shell had a series of dots within squares. To Yu's amazement, each row of squares contained fifteen dots, as did the columns and diagonals. When he added any two cells opposite along a line through the center square, like 2 and 8, he always arrived at 10. The turtle, unwitting inspirer of the Yu square, went on to a life of courtly comfort and fame.

Pickover explains why Chinese emperors, Babylonian astrologer-priests, prehistoric cave people in France, and ancient Mayans of the Yucatan were convinced that magic squares--arrays filled with numbers or letters in certain arrangements--held the secret of the universe. Since the dawn of civilization, he writes, humans have invoked such patterns to ward off evil and bring good fortune. Yet who would have guessed that in the twenty-first century, mathematicians would be studying magic squares so immense and in so many dimensions that the objects defy ordinary human contemplation and visualization?

Readers are treated to a colorful history of magic squares and similar structures, their construction, and classification along with a remarkable variety of newly discovered objects ranging from ornate inlaid magic cubes to hypercubes. Illustrated examples occur throughout, with some patterns from the author's own experiments. The tesseracts, circles, spheres, and stars that he presents perfectly convey the age-old devotion of the math-minded to this Zenlike quest. Number lovers, puzzle aficionados, and math enthusiasts will treasure this rich and lively encyclopedia of one of the few areas of mathematics where the contributions of even nonspecialists count.

L'auteur - Clifford A. Pickover

Diplomé de l'université de Yale, Clifford Pickover est un passionné de maths et un auteur prolifique. Il a publié plus de 40 ouvrages traduits dans plus de douze langues, sur des sujets très variés : mathématiques, informatique, cosmologie, magie, science fiction...

Autres livres de Clifford A. Pickover

Sommaire

  • Preface
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • Magic Construction
  • Classification
  • Gallery I : Squares, Cubes, and Tesseracts
  • Gallery 2: Circles and Spheres
  • Gallery 3: Stars, Hexagons, and Other Beauties
  • Some Final Thoughts
  • Notes
  • For Further Reading
  • Index
  • About the Author
Voir tout
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Caractéristiques techniques

  PAPIER
Éditeur(s) Princeton University Press
Auteur(s) Clifford A. Pickover
Parution 15/01/2003
Nb. de pages 418
Format 15,5 x 23,5
Couverture Broché
Poids 607g
Intérieur Noir et Blanc
EAN13 9780691115979
ISBN13 978-0-691-11597-9

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