4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful, August 13, 2010
This review is from: Inequalities: A Mathematical Olympiad Approach (Paperback)
This is one of the best books I've come across.
I think every math teacher should take a look at this book. There's something about the way that the authors explore these inequalities that makes you as a student want to explore it too.
Each section is very well explained, with example problems and solutions. After each section, the authors give a few easy exercises which follow within two or three steps from the inequality just explained in that section. Some of these are very pretty and aesthetically beautiful since they are simple and symmetric.
Middle school and high school students would benefit from seeing and working on the problems in this book because it introduces them to the essence of math, proofs. I'm not sure, but there might be a fundamentally different feeling upon being able to prove some claim or theorem as opposed to being able to solve for a quantity in question (as you would be asked to do in high school), especially a claim that starts with something as general as "For any a, b, c which are positive real numbers, we have that ...". Some of these inequalities make you think, "Really? Is this really true for any numbers I choose?" Or, "Wow. I did not know that."
(And asking "Really? Is this really true for any numbers I choose?" helps you find typos perhaps or claims that aren't true. I've found only one claim so far, in section 1.4, that's slightly too strong. One of the necessary conditions for the claim to be be true is that all the numbers be of the same sign, but the authors omitted that.)
Anyways, this book can be used to introduce proofs in a way that's beautiful (symmetry is aesthetically pleasing to most people) and simple (there are a lot of easy two or three line proofs which proves something non-obvious and yet still pretty). I also think that inequalities are more on the "practical"/applied side of math (optimizing anything is all about finding bounds and inequalities), just in case anyone thinks that this type of math is too non-practical for a student to care about. But honestly, I think that beauty and simplicity will attract students to math more than practicality, and the problems in this book are organized in a way that allows students to explore inequalities, starting from very basic claims to progressively more challenging problems (even ones coming from math competitions).
No doubt, it's a fun book.
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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent introduction to the Inequalities world, December 17, 2009
This review is from: Inequalities: A Mathematical Olympiad Approach (Paperback)
It is possible to writing a new and good book on inequalities? The answer is yes, and this work of three mexican mathematicians is an evident proof. The problems are very well selected, solutions clearly explained and, for example, it is in my opinion one of the very rare books where the Muirhead's theorem is proved in an understandable way. This powerful tool has been often used, but the proofs of it in the literature are usually obscure and very complicated. Here the difficulty of the matter can not be avoided, of course, but one can reach the end. My best congratulations to the three authors.
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
fun, May 30, 2010
This review is from: Inequalities: A Mathematical Olympiad Approach (Paperback)
This book is fun to read and solve the problems in the exercise.
It also has solution to every exercise.
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