Fantasia Mathematica Author:Clifton Fadiman Warning! Mathematicians, stay away from this book! You will be bored, mathematicians, by these stories. Clifton Fadiman, who collected and edited them, says so himself in his Introduction. You couldn't have better authority than that. The mathematics here is too naive for you. But everyone else - and that means practically all of us - come gathe... more »r round and be vastly entertained, entranced, and - who knows? - perhaps even slightly instructed.
You will learn what happens when a young man chases his fiancee right into the fourth dimension...and how a distinguished professor disappeared during a demonstration and fell headlong into a strip-teaser's act...and how a portion of Boston's underground system once vanished from the face of the earth - or was it the bowels?...and how long it would take to walk past all the books that could possibly be written...and how six monkeys might have written all those books if they hadn't been stopped...and even how universal socialism may be attained through a simple problem in sixth grade arithmetic.
And that is by no means all. Besides these lighthearted tales, there are engaging little problems, engaging little poems, and - just once in a while - a profoundly moving piece of literature.« less