Mathematics Galore!

Reviews / Votes

Mathematics Galore! is a compilation of puzzles that appeared in a series of newsletters or weekly emails from the St. Marks Institute of Mathematics. It is filled with several interesting problems and puzzles that can help inspire mathematical curiosity in students of all ages. It is difficult to read through the book without pausing to put pen to paper and try to solve the problems. The chapters are laid out so that several problems are presented; followed by hints, solutions, open problems and references. The beauty of these problems is that they are often tactile. Even a student with minimal mathematics background can begin working on the problems to see what is going on. One example of this was the puzzle that dealt with Folding. It asks if the reader can draw a line on a page and make two crease marks that divide the angle made by the line and the bottom of the page into three angles of the same size. One approach would be to get out a piece of paper and start folding. As the chapter continues it links this concept to decimal expansions of fractions in base two which gives the reader an algebraic way to study this problem. It is easy to envision a high school or college student making progress on this project. One question that came to mind while reading this book was how could I use these problems? I think they can be used in several settings. In the section about factor trees, for example, the author makes a slight change to the definition of a prime number by restricting the factors to a subset of the integers. If, for instance, we restrict allowable factors to the set of even numbers, then the number 10 is now prime, because it cannot be decomposed into two smaller even numbers. When reading this section as an algebraist I thought this would be an excellent activity to introduce unique factorization. One can see through the examples in this section that unique factorization is lost by making this change. It is often difficult for students in abstract algebra to understand when unique factorization can fail; since it does not fail for the integers, the ring with which they are most familiar. These problems and projects can also be used to create supplemental projects for a class in discrete mathematics or as an after-school activity for high school students. These problems show students what it means to do research in mathematics: they can explore the concepts and come up with their own answers. Students can make many observations by working through examples to conjecture what might happen in general. Several problems included have no known answers; they lead to open questions included in the text and possible generalizations that students could conjecture on their own. I think the best use of these problems, however, would be for a faculty member who is interested in getting undergraduates involved in research but does not know where to start. Often it can be difficult to find a real research problem that might be accessible to an undergraduate student. These problems would be great for this purpose, because students can begin working right away, experiencing the joy of discovering math for themselves, and then later increasing their knowledge base to extend their work. Since each chapter also contains a list of references, students can continue their work beyond the introductory problems once they have a handle of what is going on. I think this book is a unique resource that would be a great reference for any college faculty or high school math club advisor. I certainly enjoyed reading it!"" - Ellen Ziliak MAA Reviews

""Mathematics Galore! is a collection of stimulating problems, extensions, puzzlers, and tidbits organized into 26 engaging essays around significant mathematical ideas (e.g., tessllations and partitions). The book is ideal for those who enjoy exploring mathematics concepts, problems, and connections. As Tanton notes, it is intended for high school teachers, student teachers, math club organizers, college faculty who prepare teachers or teach mathematics appreciation courses, mathematicians, mathematics majors, general mathematics enthusiasts, and mathematics circles. The last essay is entitled ""Weird Multiplication,"" and I explored the ideas presented here in a current course for preservice elementary school and middle school teachers. Although many of the methods (e.g., lattice multiplications and the area diagram) are ideas that I had discussed in previous courses, this book included new methods and extensions. I found that my students thoroughly enjoyed exploring the multiplication methods; in addition, by exploring these new algorithms, they were able to deepen their understanding of the underlying mathematics. Moreover, this book has inspired me to create several new projects for my courses for preservice teachers. I was thoroughly engaged and stimulated by reading and working through the problems in Mathematics Galore! I highly recommend this book."" - Kelly McCormick, Mathematics Teacher