CiNii Books - Tracking the automatic ant and other mathematical explorations

For those fascinated by the abstract universe of mathematics, David Gale's columns in The Mathematical Intelligencer have been a prime source of entertainment. Here Gale's columns are collected for the first time in book form. Encouraged by the magazine's editor, Sheldon Axler, to write on whatever pleased him, Gale ranged far and wide across the field of mathematics but frequently returned to favorite themes: triangles, tilings, the mysterious properties of sequences given by simple recursions, games and paradoxes, and the particular automaton that gives this collection its title, the "automatic ant". The level is suitable for those with some familiarity with mathematical ideas, but great sophistication is not needed.

Table of Contents

Simple Sequences with Puzzling Properties
Probability Paradoxes
Historic Conjectures: More Sequence Mysteries
Privacy Preserving Protocols
Surprising Shuffles
Hundreds of New Theorems in a Two-Thousand-Year-Old Subject
Pop-Math and Protocols
Six Variations on the Variational Method
Tiling a Torus: Cutting a Cake
The Automatic Ant: Compassless Constructions
Games: Real, Complex, Imaginary
Coin Weighing: Square Squaring
The Return of the Ant and the Jeep
Go
More Paradoxes, Knowledge Games
Triangles and Computers
Packing Tripods
Further Travels with My Ant
The Shoelace Problem
Triangles and Proofs
Polyominoes
In Praise of Numberlessness
A Pattern Problem, a Probability Paradox and a Pretty Proof. Appendices: A Curious Nim-Type Game
The Jeep Once More and Jeeper by the Dozen
Nineteen Problems on Elementary Geometry
The Truth and Nothing But the Truth.

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Tracking the automatic ant and other mathematical explorations

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