Math Goes to the Movies by Polster, Burkard -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

Index

Cover Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Preface Part I Movies

1 Good Math Hunting

1.1 How to Become a Math Consultant 1.2 Actors Versus Blackboards 1.3 Lambeau, the Fields Medalist 1.4 A Professor Turns Actor 1.5 Mathematics: “Perceval” 1.6 Students in Action 1.7 Mathematics: Graph Theory 1 1.8 Mathematics: Eigenvalues 1.9 Mathematics: Graph Theory 2 1.10 Mathematics: Graph Theory 3 1.11 Mathematics: The Salieri Scene 1.12 Further References and Remarks 1.13 Parodies

2 The Clever Hand Behind A Beautiful Mind

2.1 Real Math Beats Fake Math 2.2 Signature Scene 2.3 The Riemann Hypothesis 2.4 The Blonde and the Nobel Prize 2.5 Hand Double 2.6 Bits and Pieces

3 Escalante Stands and Delivers

3.1 Welcome to the Finger Man 3.2 Filling the Hole 3.3 Let X Be the Number of Girlfriends 3.4 Newton Was an Idiot 3.5 The Students Stand and Deliver, Again 3.6 Will the Real Jaime Escalante Please Stand Up?

4 The Annotated Pi Files

4.1 Max the Mathematician 4.2 Mathematics Is the Language of Nature 4.3 Pattern in Pi 4.4 Numerology: Father + Mother = Child 4.5 The Fibonacci Numbers and the Golden Ratio 4.6 Archimedes the Goldfish 4.7 Coincidence, or Is It? 4.8 Back to the Golden Ratio 4.9 Staring into the Sun 4.10 The Name of God 4.11 Living Happily Ever After

5 Nitpicking in Mathmagic Land

5.1 Tiny Nitpick: What Is Pi? 5.2 Historical Nitpick: Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans 5.3 Small Nitpick: Pythagorean Music 5.4 Medium Nitpick: The Golden Section 5.5 Large Nitpick: Three-Cushion Billiards 5.6 NOTpick 5.7 Notes

6 Escape from the Cube

6.1 The Cube in Cube 6.2 First Insight: The Power of Primes 6.3 How to Avoid Prime Numbers 6.4 Second Insight: The Cube in Coordinates 6.5 Third Insight: Permutations 6.6 Final Insight: Prime Powers 6.7 Other Cubes

7 The Incredible Shrinking Room

7.1 How Good a Puzzler Are You? 7.2 Answers to the Puzzles 7.3 Notes

8 Murder in the Hot House

8.1 The Story 8.2 Let’s Kill Some Mathematicians 8.3 The Writing on the Wall 8.4 Let’s Run Away and Join the Circus

9 A Word Problem for Die Hards

9.1 Playing Billiards with the Die Hard Problem 9.2 A Recipe 9.3 Thwarting a Different Simon 9.4 The Least Common Multiple 9.5 References

10 7 × 13 = 28

10.1 First Proof: Bogus Division 10.2 Second Proof: Bogus Multiplication 10.3 Third Proof: Bogus Addition 10.4 Play it Again, Abbott 10.5 General Bogus Math

11 One Mirror Has Two Faces, Two Mirrors Have …

11.1 Real Life 11.2 Prime Numbers 11.3 Calculus 11.4 Mathematical Miscellany 11.5 The Other Mirror 11.6 Notes

12 It’s My Turn for Some Serious Mathematics

12.1 The Snake Rears Its Lovely Head 12.2 The Classification of Finite Simple Groups 12.3 Questions and Answers 12.4 Notes

Part II Mathematics

13 Beautiful Math, or Better Off Dead

13.1 The Direct Approach 13.2 The Poetic Approach 13.3 The All-Singing, All-Dancing Approach 13.4 Any Place, Any Time

14 Pythagoras and Fermat at the Movies

14.1 Pythagoras’s Theorem 14.2 Fermat’s Last Theorem 14.3 Fermat’s Last Tango

15 Survival in the Fourth Dimension

15.1 Time, Space, Both, or What? 15.2 The Hypercube Via Analogy 15.3 Picturing the Hypercube 15.4 Dimension Drive 15.5 Intersections 15.6 The Hypersphere

16 To Infinity, and Beyond!

16.1 Mystical Musings 16.2 Toward Infinity, but Getting Lost 16.3 Toward Infinity, and Almost Getting There 16.4 Toward the Infinitely Small: Romantic Zeno 16.5 To Infinity: Are We There Yet? 16.6 Fishing with a Really Big Net 16.7 Infinity Pays Its Way 16.8 Pretty Patterns, Pretty Pi 16.9 Golden Infinity 16.10 A Golden Argument 16.11 Poetic Summation

17 Problem Corner

17.1 Problems for Wizkids, and a Wizdog 17.2 Math Quiz for Mortals 17.3 Devilish Problems 17.4 Crazy Problems for Extra Credit

18 Money-Back Bloopers

18.1 Boosting the Computer 18.2 Playing the Percentages 18.3 The Curse of Pi 18.4 Prime Problems 18.5 Slips of the Tongue 18.6 Less Is More 18.7 Simple Arithmetic? 18.8 A Very Tough Quadratic 18.9 The Algebra Problem 18.10 A Tough Competition 18.11 Scary Geometry

19 The Funny Files

19.1 Sex 19.2 Geometry 19.3 Arithmetic 19.4 Algebra and Word Problems 19.5 Mathematicians in Action 19.6 Doing the Impossible 19.7 What Are the Odds? 19.8 Odds And Ends

Part III Lists

20 People Lists

20.1 Real Mathematicians 20.2 Female Mathematicians 20.3 Interesting Math Teachers and Classroom Scenes 20.4 Wizkids 20.5 Mathematicians and Murder 20.6 Famous Actors Being Mathematical 20.7 Math Consultants

21 Topics Lists

21.1 Counting to 101 21.2 Math Titles but No Math 21.3 Pythagoras’s Theorem and Fermat’s Last Theorem 21.4 Geometry 21.5 Higher Dimensions 21.6 Topology 21.7 Golden Ratio and Fibonacci Numbers 21.8 Pi 21.9 Prime Numbers and Number Theory 21.10 Chaos, Fractals, and Dynamical Systems 21.11 Communicating with Aliens 21.12 Code Breaking 21.13 Calculus 21.14 Infinity 21.15 Paradoxes 21.16 Probability, Gambling, and Percentages 21.17 Famous Formulas, Identities, and Magic Squares 21.18 Mathematical Games

Movie Index Footnotes

Preface

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Chapter 1

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Chapter 2

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Chapter 3

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Chapter 4

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Chapter 5

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Chapter 6

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Chapter 7

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Chapter 8

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Chapter 9

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Chapter 10

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Chapter 11

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Chapter 12

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Chapter 14

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Chapter 15

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Chapter 16

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Chapter 18

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Chapter 19

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Chapter 20

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Chapter 21

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