The Best Writing on Mathematics 2014

Mircea Pitici holds a PhD mathematics education from Cornell University, where he teaches math and writing. He has edited The Best Writing on Mathematics since 2010.

Introduction, Mircea Pitici ix Mathematics and the Good Life, Stephen Pollard 1 The Rise of Big Data: How It's Changing the Way We Think about the World, Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger 20 Conway's Wizards, Tanya Khovanova 33 On Unsettleable Arithmetical Problems, John H. Conway 39 Color illustration section follows page 48 Crinkly Curves, Brian Hayes 49 Why Do We Perceive Logarithmically? Lav R. Varshney and John Z. Sun 64 The Music of Math Games, Keith Devlin 74 The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra for Artists, Bahman Kalantari and Bruce Torrence 87 The Arts-Digitized, Quantified, and Analyzed, Nicole Lazar 96 On the Number of Klein Bottle Types, Carlo H. Sequin 105 Adventures in Mathematical Knitting, Sarah-Marie Belcastro 128 The Mathematics of Fountain Design: A Multiple-Centers Activity, Marshall Gordon 144 Food for (Mathematical) Thought, Penelope Dunham 156 Wondering about Wonder in Mathematics, Dov Zazkis and Rina Zazkis 165 The Lesson of Grace in Teaching, Francis Edward Su 188 Generic Proving: Reflections on Scope and Method, Uri Leron and Orit Zaslavsky 198 Extreme Proofs I: The Irrationality of 2, John H. Conway and Joseph Shipman 216 Stuck in the Middle: Cauchy's Intermediate Value Theorem and the History of Analytic Rigor, Michael J. Barany 228 Plato, Poincare, and the Enchanted Dodecahedron: Is the Universe Shaped Like the Poincare Homology Sphere? Lawrence Brenton 239 Computing with Real Numbers, from Archimedes to Turing and Beyond, Mark Braverman 251 Chaos at Fifty, Adilson E. Motter and David K. Campbell 270 Twenty-Five Analogies for Explaining Statistical Concepts, Roberto Behar, Pere Grima, and Lluis Marco-Almagro 288 College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage, David Gale and Lloyd S. Shapley 299 The Beauty of Bounded Gaps, Jordan Ellenberg 308 Contributors 315 Notable Writings 325 Acknowledgments 333 Credits 335