Klein Project Blog

November’s Book of the Month is Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter (Basic Books, 1979).

This book is about symmetry, self-reference, and other fundamental mathematical ideas explored through the works of the three people named in the title. Despite word-play being a fundamental feature of the book, it has been successfully translated into French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Swedish, Dutch and Russian.
Douglas Hofstadter took over from Martin Gardner writing for the Scientific American. A collection of these writings, Metamagical Themas, is another work that will be of interest.

October’s Book of the Month is Cuentos Con Cuentas by Miguel de Guzman (Labor, Barcelona, 1984).

This is also published in English under the title The Countingbury Tales, translated by Jody Doran and published by World Scientific (2000).

Have a look inside.

Miguel de Guzman wrote other similar books, the most well known being Aventuras Matematicas which is also published in Chinese, Finnish, French and Portuguese.

Septembers Seite des Monats ist: Bridges

Bridges ist eine Organisation, die die jährliche Bridges Konferenz über Mathematik und Kunst leitet. Die Seite beinhaltet viele Bilder und Quellen verschiedenster künstlerischer Darstellungen: von Poesie bis zu Modellen, von Tanz bis zu Origami, von Jonglieren bis zur Malerei. Der Reiter -Resources- auf der Homepage enthält Links zu anderen Seiten, die für Lehrer von Interesse sind.

September’s featured book of the month is “Mathematical Models” by H.M. Cundy and A.P. Rolett.

This classic was first published in 1952 by Oxford University Press, but was republished in paperback by Tarquin in 1981.

As well as nets polyhedra, it has a wide variety of linkages and dissections, as well as several mechanical models.

September’s featured book of the month is “Mathematical Models” by H.M. Cundy and A.P. Rolett.

This classic was first published in 1952 by Oxford University Press, but was republished in paperback by Tarquin in 1981.

As well as nets polyhedra, it has a wide variety of linkages and dissections, as well as several mechanical models.

August’s featured book of the month is “Indra’s Pearls: The Vision of Felix Klein” by David Mumford, Caroline Series and David Wright.

Wikipedia says:
“The book explores the patterns created by iterating conformal maps of the complex plane called Möbius transformations, and their connections with symmetry and self-similarity.

The book’s title refers to Indra’s net, a metaphorical object described in the Buddhist text of the Flower Garland Sutra. Indra’s net consists of an infinite array of gossamer strands and pearls. The frontispiece to Indra’s Pearls quotes the following description:

In the glistening surface of each pearl are reflected all the other pearls … In each reflection, again are reflected all the infinitely many other pearls, so that by this process, reflections of reflections continue without end.

The allusion to Felix Klein’s “vision” is a reference to Klein’s early investigations of Schottky groups and hand-drawn plots of their limit sets. It also refers to Klein’s wider vision of the connections between group theory, symmetry and geometry.”