The Best Writing on Mathematics 2014

Introduction, Mircea Pitici ix
Mathematics and the Good Life, Stephen Pollard 1
The Rise of Big Data: How It's Changing the Way We Think about the World, Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger 20
Conway's Wizards, Tanya Khovanova 33
On Unsettleable Arithmetical Problems, John H. Conway 39
Color illustration section follows page 48
Crinkly Curves, Brian Hayes 49
Why Do We Perceive Logarithmically? Lav R. Varshney and John Z. Sun 64
The Music of Math Games, Keith Devlin 74
The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra for Artists, Bahman Kalantari and Bruce Torrence 87
The Arts-Digitized, Quantified, and Analyzed, Nicole Lazar 96
On the Number of Klein Bottle Types, Carlo H. Séquin 105
Adventures in Mathematical Knitting, Sarah-Marie Belcastro 128
The Mathematics of Fountain Design: A Multiple-Centers Activity, Marshall Gordon 144
Food for (Mathematical) Thought, Penelope Dunham 156
Wondering about Wonder in Mathematics, Dov Zazkis and Rina Zazkis 165
The Lesson of Grace in Teaching, Francis Edward Su 188
Generic Proving: Reflections on Scope and Method, Uri Leron and Orit Zaslavsky 198
Extreme Proofs I: The Irrationality of 2, John H. Conway and Joseph Shipman 216
Stuck in the Middle: Cauchy's Intermediate Value Theorem and the History of Analytic Rigor, Michael J. Barany 228
Plato, Poincaré, and the Enchanted Dodecahedron: Is the Universe Shaped Like the Poincaré Homology Sphere? Lawrence Brenton 239
Computing with Real Numbers, from Archimedes to Turing and Beyond, Mark Braverman 251
Chaos at Fifty, Adilson E. Motter and David K. Campbell 270
Twenty-Five Analogies for Explaining Statistical Concepts, Roberto Behar, Pere Grima, and Lluís Marco-Almagro 288
College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage, David Gale and Lloyd S. Shapley 299
The Beauty of Bounded Gaps, Jordan Ellenberg 308
Contributors 315
Notable Writings 325
Acknowledgments 333
Credits 335