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Impossible?: Surprising Solutions to Counterintuitive Conundrums | 
 enlarge | Author: Julian Havil
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $14.90
You Save: $13.05 (47%)
New (40) Used (12) from $12.37
Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 16641
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 264
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 0.7
ISBN: 0691131317
Dewey Decimal Number: 510
EAN: 9780691131313
ASIN: 0691131317
Publication Date: April 21, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Text New/Has Dust Jacket; New Book , Slightly bumped corners,Wrinkles and light wear on edges of dust jacket . Some light scratches on surfaces of dust jacket.
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Product Description
pIn iNonplussed!/i, popular-math writer Julian Havil delighted readers with a mind-boggling array of implausible yet true mathematical paradoxes. Now Havil is back with iImpossible?/i, another marvelous medley of the utterly confusing, profound, and unbelievable--and all of it mathematically irrefutable./pp Whenever Forty-second Street in New York is temporarily closed, traffic doesn't gridlock but flows more smoothly--why is that? Or consider that cities that build new roads can experience dramatic increases in traffic congestion--how is this possible? What does the game show iLet's Make A Deal/i reveal about the unexpected hazards of decision-making? What can the game of cricket teach us about the surprising behavior of the law of averages? These are some of the counterintuitive mathematical occurrences that readers encounter in iImpossible?/i/pp Havil ventures further than ever into territory where intuition can lead one astray. He gathers entertaining problems from probability and statistics along with an eclectic variety of conundrums and puzzlers from other areas of mathematics, including classics of abstract math like the Banach-Tarski paradox. These problems range in difficulty from easy to highly challenging, yet they can be tackled by anyone with a background in calculus. And the fascinating history and personalities associated with many of the problems are included with their mathematical proofs. iImpossible?/i will delight anyone who wants to have their reason thoroughly confounded in the most astonishing and unpredictable ways./p
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| Customer Reviews:
you may be a little too surprised by these surprises to be surprised October 21, 2008
James H. Waters (boulder colorado)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
i warn the potential purchaser that this may not be quite what you expect. There is a demand for substantial mathematical sophistication - which was a little beyond my level (i do have a doctorate, but not in math, and had to stop taking math courses after my sophomore year in college because matrix algebra was about all i could handle). i don't doubt that the book is delightful for those strong in math and i probably would give it 5 stars except that the title strikes me as a bit misleading. probably your average college graduate would not know enough to find these conundrums counterintuitive, and the solutions, likewise, are probably not much more surprising than that the conundrums are supposedly common-sensical. not a criticism of the material, more of the packaging. br / br /james h waters phd
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