In Instant Mathematics, Key Thinkers, Theories, Discoveries
and Concepts, Paul Parsons and Gail Dixon put together a very easy to read
collection of 160 lessons, each explained on a single page. The lessons cover
both mathematical concepts and mathematicians. The book is chronologically
starting with the discovery of the oldest known mathematical artifact, the
Lebombo bone (found with counting tally marks) and ending with modern day analytics.
The illusrations are clear and supplement the concepts
reviewed. As a material science engineer, I particularly liked the lesson on
Kepler’s Conjecture which asserts the most efficient way to pack spheres in a
volume. Also see the post in this blog: Math
Vacation: Atomic interstitial sizes in higher dimensions
(jamesmacmath.blogspot.com).
A few of the lessons cover cryptography, including examples
from ancient Mesopotamia and Greece and ending with modern quantum algorithms.
In a prior post I propose a much less sophisticated method - Math
Vacation: One-Time Pad Coding and a Proposal for Improvement
(jamesmacmath.blogspot.com).
The book is part of Simon & Schuster series called
Instant Knowledge.
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