REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Taking chances by John Haigh, Oxford, 1999, is the definitive book about games of chance, including a discussion of a number of TV game shows.

The Artful Universe by John Barrow, Little Brown, 1995, is a fascinating look at why humans find certain things attractive. Among other things, it contains a more in-depth description of the development of the western week and the musical scale.

Mathematics Today, edited by Lynn Arthur Steen, 1980, was the source of several ideas in this book. It includes the story of the four-colour theorem and various sections on packing.

Websites also provided a rich source of material, in particular two outstanding sites, www.nrich.maths.org and www.mathforum.org.

Other book sources:

The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, David Wells, Penguin, 1977

The Calendar, David Ewing Duncan, Fourth Estate, 1998 Vertical Transportation – Elevators & Escalators, George Strakosch, John Wiley, 1983

Introduction to Probability Theory I, William Feller, John Wiley, 1957

The Mathematical Brain, Brian Butterworth, Macmillan, 1999

You are a Mathematician, David Wells, Penguin, 1995

Chaos, James Gleick, Minerva, 1997

The Magical Maze, Ian Stewart, Phoenix, 1998

Mathematical Carnival, Martin Gardner, Pelican, 1978

Lady Luck, Warren Weaver, Pelican, 1977

Further Mathematical Diversions, Martin Gardner, Pelican, 1977

Who is Fourier, Transnational College of Lex, LRF, 1995

The Moscow Puzzles, Boris A. Kordemsky, Dover, 1992

20% of Nothing, AK. Dewdney, Little Brown, 1993

Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos, Penguin, 1990

 

The Weakest Link, John Haigh

The Rise and Fall of the Pyramid Schemes in Albania, Chris Jarvis

The Best Known Packings of Equal Circles in the Unit Square, E. Specht

Literary and Linguistic computing, Richard Forsyth and David Holmes

New Directions in Text Categorisation, Richard Forsyth

The Ghost’s Vocabulary, Edward Dolnick

The Power of One, Robert Matthews

The Mathematics of Diseases, Matt Keeling

Pythagorean Tuning and Medieval Polyphony, Margo Schulter

The Development of Musical Tuning Systems, Peter A Frazer

Several of these articles can be found using searches on the worldwide web.