James Roy Newman Books

You don’t have to love math to enjoy a hand of cards, a night at the casino, or a puzzle. But your pleasure and prowess at games, gambling, and other numerically related pursuits can be heightened with this entertaining volume, in which the authors offer a fascinating view of some of the lesser-known and more imaginative aspects of mathematics.A brief and breezy explanation of the new language of mathematics precedes a smorgasbord of such thought-provoking subjects as the googolplex (the largest definite number anyone has yet bothered to conceive of); assorted geometries — plane and fancy; famous puzzles that made mathematical history; and tantalizing paradoxes. Gamblers receive fair warning on the laws of chance; a look at rubber-sheet geometry twists circles into loops without sacrificing certain important properties; and an exploration of the mathematics of change and growth shows how calculus, among its other uses, helps trace the path of falling bombs.Written with wit and clarity for the intelligent reader who has taken high school and perhaps college math, this volume deftly progresses from simple arithmetic to calculus and non-Euclidean geometry. It “lives up to its title in every way [and] might well have been merely terrifying, whereas it proves to be both charming and exciting." — Saturday Review of Literature.

Godel's Proof was first published in the US in 1958. In 1931 there appeared in a German scientific periodical a relatively short paper with the forbidding title "On Formally Undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems". Its author was Kurt Godel, then a young mathematician of 25 at the University of Vienna who since 1938 was a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The paper is a milestone in the history of logic and mathematics. When Harvard University awarded Godel an honorary degree, the citation described the work as one of the most important advances in logic in modern times. At the time of its appearance, however, neither the title of Godel's paper nor its content was intelligible to most mathematicians.