Название: Mathematicians Playing Games
Автор: Jon-Lark Kim
Издательство: CRC Press
Серия: AK Peters/CRC Recreational Mathematics Series
Год: 2024
Страниц: 135
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 28.3 MB

Mathematicians Playing Games explores a wide variety of popular mathematical games, including their historical beginnings and the mathematical theories that underpin them. Its academic level is suitable for high school students and higher, but people of any age or level will find something to entertain them, and something new to learn. It would be a fantastic resource for high school mathematics classrooms or undergraduate mathematics for liberal arts course and belongs on the shelf of anyone with an interest in recreational mathematics.

Mathematics is known to be difficult and not interesting to many people. However, some people including me think that mathematics is an interesting and challenging subject. Why is this so? We want to know the reason why the viewpoints of mathematics are different among people. I decided to write this book with the hope that people can change their negative mind on mathematics into the positive mind.

People who think that mathematics is exciting have a good feeling about mathematics since their childhood. Mathematics is made up of numbers. Kids already know or are familiar with numbers before they go to school. Kids eat an apple and ask for another one. They share some candies with their friends and count the remaining candies. They experience numbers in real life and learn formal numbers at school. Hence, they feel comfortable with simple numbers.

However, when they learn even and odd numbers, addition or multiplication of two-digit numbers, the patterns of various figures, and more advanced mathematical concepts as time goes by, they are gradually losing their interest in mathematics.

Then, is there a way to think that mathematics is creative and challenging by enjoying mathematical concepts? If we remember our old days with no internet, there were offline games. The most common game was played with marbles. If a player guesses the correct number of marbles hidden in a hand, the player wins the game. Sometimes, a player tries to hit marbles from a distance in order to send them further than others. In some sense, the former game is like an Algebra and the latter game is like a Geometry. By playing these kinds of games, I became familiar with mathematics and majored in mathematics in the end.

Thanks to this experience, I came up with games related to mathematics. I hope that adults as well as kids can eliminate their anxiety on mathematics by this approach and regard mathematics as a kind of game or play. I have selected famous games for this book which also have some mathematical concepts. This book is based on a series of columns which appeared as “Jon-Lark Kim’s board game festa” in the public magazine Math Donga of Korea. It consists of games which can be played alone or with other people. Some games can be played online. These games can be used as a means of teaching mathematical concepts at school or after school. Of course, they can be used for recreation among friends without any difficulty to learn mathematics hidden in the games.

In this book, there are games which help to learn basic mathematical concepts, and there are also games which contain very complicated mathematical concepts although the rules of the games are easy to follow. There is no problem enjoying the games even if you do not know the principles of mathematics. However, if you know the mathematical concept, you will enjoy the game with a lot of interest. There are mathematicians who try to solve the games mathematically. While there are also mathematicians who create mathematical games, I will try to introduce mathematicians who worked in various eras together with their brilliant ideas containing mathematical concepts. These mathematicians really enjoyed the games. With the games in this book, you can feel the taste of mathematics real mathematicians feel.

Features:

Suitable for anyone with an interest in games and mathematics, and could be especially useful to middle and high school students and their teachers
Includes various exercises for fun for readers.