Littlewood's Miscellany

Béla Bollobás (Edited by)

9780521337021, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 30 October 1986

212 pages
22.7 x 15.1 x 1.2 cm, 0.27 kg

"Every line will delight lovers of mathematics, but even readers who have never had a mathematical thought will--if they love evidence of humane intelligence and wise wit--find here much to savor. A very special classic." SciTech Book News

Littlewood's Miscellany, which includes most of the earlier work as well as much of the material Professor Littlewood collected after the publication of A Mathematician's Miscellany, allows us to see academic life in Cambridge, especially in Trinity College, through the eyes of one of its greatest figures. The joy that Professor Littlewood found in life and mathematics is reflected in the many amusing anecdotes about his contemporaries, written in his pungent, aphoristic style. The general reader should, in most instances, have no trouble following the mathematical passages. For this publication, the new material has been prepared by Béla Bollobás; his foreword is based on a talk he gave to the British Society for the History of Mathematics on the occasion of Littlewood's centenary.

Frontispiece
Preface
Foreword
1. Introduction to A Mathematician's Miscellany
2. Mathematics with minimum 'Raw Material'
3. From the mathematical tripos
4. Cross-purposes, unconscious assumptions, howlers, misprints, etc
5. The zoo
6. Ballistics
7. The dilemma of probability theory
8. From Fermat's last theorem to the abolition of capital punishment
9. A mathematical education
10. Review of Ramanujan's collected papers
11. Large numbers
12. Lion and man
13. People
14. Academic life
15. Odds and ends
16. Newton and the attraction of a sphere
17. The discovery of Neptune
18. The Adams-Airy affair
19. The mathematician's art of work.

Subject Areas: Mathematics [PB]