How to Cut a Cake and Other Mathematical Conundrums
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Author(s): I. Stewart
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199205906
Format: softback
231pp
Price: £9.99
Review Date: 15 November 2006
Review: Ian Stewart, Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University here shared his boundless enthusiasm for things mathematical by wrapping up mathematical problems in curious ‘real world’ puzzles. The cake to be cut is of course the old theoretical problem – I cut and you choose – but how do you guarantee fairness as more and more people are included? The author works through it all and provides the required algorithm. There are twenty such conundrums and puzzles, covering a diversity of problems, with topics ranging from graphs, probability and logic, to topology and quasi-crystals, with stories of never-ending chess games and flashing fireflies etc.