Cool Stories About Numbers by Steven Strogatz
I mentioned a little while ago that Steve Strogatz’s has started a series of posts on numbers. By now, Steve has published six sequels. Every one of his posts explains in a very understandable manner either seemingly simple or seemingly complex issues related to numbers. They are very joyful and entertaining reads.
- “From Fish to Infinity” — what are numbers, counting, great Seseame Street video
“Rock Groups” — odd numbers can form L-shapes
uneven numbers can form L-Shapes
“The Enemy of My Enemy” — making peace with negative numbers
- “Division and Its Discontents” — fun with fractions, decimals and numbers like 0.12122122212222…
around here Steve moves from grade school arithmetic to high school math
- “The Joy of X” — “…in the end they all boil down to just two activities — solving for x and working with formulas.” … and always check for the units!
- “Finding Your Roots” — the square root of -1; complex numbers have all the properties as real numbers […], but they are better than real numbers, because they always have roots; a flip of 180 degrees can happen by multiplying twice with i or by multiplying with -1, so $$i^{2}=-1$$; fractals
Update Saturday; March 13, 2010:
Seedmagazine just published an interview with Steven Strogatz. The occasion of the interview was a book recently published by Strogatz: The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned about Life While Corresponding about Math
