- The art of mathematics
- How many guards does an art gallery need?
- Aspects of aspect ratios
- Vickrey auctions
- How to sing in tune
- The Grand Jeté
- Impossible beliefs
- Xerography-- Déjà vu all over again
- Making pages look nice
- The sound of silence
- A most unusual cake recipe
- Designing roller coasters
- The beginning of the universe live on TV
- Coping with stress
- Art is critical
- Culinary arts
- Curved triangles
- The days of the week
- The case for procrastination
- Diamonds are forever
- How do you doodle?
- Why are eggs egg-shaped
- The El Greco effect
- Eureka
- What the eye tells the brain
- Why the flag of Nepal is unique
- The Indian rope trick
- An image that defeats the eye
- It's Friday the thirteenth again
- Strip friezes
- The gherkin
- Hedging your bets
- Infinity at the theater
- Shedding light on (and with) the golden ratio
- Magic squares
- Mondrian's golden rectangles
- Monkey business with tiles
- Pleasing sounds
- New tiles from old
- The nine-degree solution
- Paper sizes and a book in the hand
- Penny blacks and penny reds
- Prime time cycles
- If you can't measure it, why not?
- The art of nebulae
- Reverse auctions : going backward for Christmas
- Ritual geometry for the gods
- Prize rosettes
- Getting a handle on water music : singing in the shower
- Sizing up pictures
- Triquetra
- Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow
- Some perils of pictures
- Drinking with Socrates
- Strange formulae
- Stylometry : mathematics rules the waves
- Getting it together
- When time has to reckon with space
- How to watch TV
- Curvaceous vase profiles
- All the wallpapers in the universe
- The art of war
- Shattering wineglasses
- Let the light shine in
- Special triangles
- Gnomons are golden
- The upside-down world of Scott Kim
- How many words did Shakespeare know?
- The strange and wonderful law of first digits
- Organ donor preferences
- Elliptical whispering galleries
- The tunnel of Eupalinos
- A time-and-motion study of the Great Pyramid
- Picking out tigers in the bushes
- The art of the second law
- On a clear day...
- Salvador Dalí and the fourth dimension
- The sound of music
- Chernoff's faces
- The man from underground
- Möbius and his band
- The bells, the bells
- Following the herd
- Finger counting
- The other Newton's hymn to the infinite
- Charles Dickens was no average man, Florence Nightingale no average woman
- Markov's literary chains
- From free will to the Russian elections
- Playing with supreme beings
- The drawbacks of being a know-all
- Watching paint crack
- Pop music's magic equation
- Random art
- Jack the Dripper
- The bridge of strings
- Lacing problems
- Where to stand to look at statues
- The hotel infinity
- The color of music
- Shakespeare's monkeys : the new generation.
At first glance, the worlds of math and the arts might not seem like comfortable neighbors. But as mathematician John D. Barrow points out, they have a strong and natural affinity-after all, math is the study of all patterns, and the world of the arts is rich with pattern. Barrow whisks us through 100 thought-provoking and often whimsical intersections between math and many arts, from the golden ratios of Mondrian's rectangles and the curious fractal-like nature of Pollock's drip paintings to ballerinas' gravity-defying leaps and the next generation of monkeys on typewriters tackling Shakespeare. For those of us with our feet planted more firmly on the ground, Barrow also wields everyday equations to reveal how many guards are needed in an art gallery or where you should stand to look at sculptures. From music and drama to literature and the visual arts, Barrow's witty and accessible observations are sure to spark the imaginations of math nerds and art aficionados alike.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)
