Cows in the Maze: And Other Mathematical Explorations

Ian Stewart
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2010, 320 PAGES
PRICE (PAPERBACK) £8.99 ISBN 978-0-19-956207-7

The book is an eclectic mix of mathematics selected from Ian Stewart’s columns in Scientific American. It is the third such collection he has written. The book offers a wonderful insight into the range of diverse topics that mathematics as a subject has to offer.

The author’s style makes you want to read on, each chapter unfolding detective like a story, which allows you to discover various important facts as you are guided through the mystery. The difference being in a murder mystery you usually find out in the end who done-it, but in these short stories that black and white-ness is much more murky.

Sometimes the chapters draw to a close with a conclusion, but mostly they leave you with problems yet to be solved. Leaving the reader with a real feeling that mathematics is an evolving subject that requires enquiring minds willing to puzzle and experiment. One of the chapters ends with “There is much here for the amateur to investigate….Can anything be proved about the conjectured solutions?”

The chapters are mostly independent, enabling the reader to dip in and out. Some of the 21 chapters are about applications of mathematics covering topics such as Walking with Quadrupeds, The Interrogator’s Fallacy, Cementing Relationships and Making Winning Connections. Other chapters focus more on the abstract side of mathematics such as Most-Perfect Magic Squares, Knight’s Tours on Rectangles and Jumping Champions. Yet in saying this, even in these recreational maths chapters the author never lets us forget the importance of experimenting with the maths to help us truly understand how it works. In the chapter on Prime Numbers he leaves us with the sentence, “As far as I know, these questions are wide open, even for relatively small values of x”.

Ian Stewart’s enthusiasm for mathematics pours out through the pages of this book. I would recommend it as a good read for all those interested in learning more about mathematics.

PS. If you find that cow in the maze then congratulations, as I walked right past it until it mooed at me!