Wheels, Life and Other Mathematical Amusements

Wheels, Life and Other Mathematical Amusements is a book by Martin Gardner published in 1983. The Basic Library List Committee of the Mathematical Association of America has recommended its inclusion in undergraduate mathematics libraries.[1]

Contents

Wheels, Life and Other Mathematical Amusements is a book of 22 revised and extended mathematical games columns previously published in Scientific American.[2] It is Gardner's 10th collection of columns, and includes material on Conway's Game of Life, supertasks, nontransitive dice, braided polyhedra, combinatorial game theory, the Collatz conjecture, mathematical card tricks, and Diophantine equations such as Fermat's Last Theorem.[3]

Reception

Dave Langford reviewed Wheels, Life and Other Mathematical Amusements for White Dwarf #55, and stated that "Here too are revisions of the three famous pieces on Conway's solitaire game Life, which has absorbed several National Debts' worth of computer time since 1970. Fascinating."[2] The book was positively reviewed in several other mathematics and science journals.[4]

gollark: Indeed. It makes people less likely to try and actually investigate how their system works and treat it as a black box.
gollark: Chromebooks and iPhones and kind of Android phones/tablets (especially on newer versions) use general purpose processors, but with locked bootloaders and limited OSes. Generally to give the company making them a monopoly on app distribution/data gathering and to make DRM schemes "work".
gollark: Or, well, try to.
gollark: There seems to be an increasing trend to make computing stuff not general-purpose, which is annoying.
gollark: Phones are general-purpose computers, regardless of how much the companies don't really want that.

References
  1. "Wheels, Life, and Other Mathematical Amusements". Mathematical Association of America. Retrieved 2020-07-09.
  2. Langford, Dave (July 1984). "Critical Mass". White Dwarf. Games Workshop (Issue 55): 20.
  3. Heuer, G. A. "Review of Wheels, Life and Other Mathematical Amusements". zbMATH. Zbl 0537.00002.
  4. Additional reviews:
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