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Mathematical Adventures for Students and Amateurs (Spectrum)

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Some of the most prominent mathematicians have delivered a talk in the Bay Area Mathematical Adventures (BAMA) series. It is a sequence of lectures for high school age people designed to expose them to some of the beautiful aspects of mathematics. However, the lectures are open to others, so many teachers, middle school students, parents and other interested adults have attended. This book is a written collection of some of the lectures, although none is a literal recording of the event.
Some of the lecture titles and topics in the book are:

*) "Prime Numbers and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence", a discussion of how messages to aliens should be organized along prime number lines.
*) "Juggling Patterns, Passing and Posets", a mathematical explanation of the different actions used in juggling.
*) "Probability and Surprise", how non-intuitive statistical results were used to teach mathematics to French psychology students.
*) "Space Shuttle Geometry", a description of good and bad ways to verify that an o-ring is indeed round. This is presented in the context of the failure of the o-rings that led to the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger.
*) "Breaking Driver's License Codes", where a mathematician tries to determine the algorithm whereby the personal information about a driver is used to compute the personal identifier that they are assigned.

The purpose of the series is to instill in the listeners an appreciation for how widely mathematics is used and in that respect, the organizers and lecturers have clearly succeeded. Of course, some of the topics require more mathematical knowledge than others, but none is beyond the stated bounds. If they think about it hard enough and in the proper way, the determined high school student will be able to understand every adventure.
Teachers of college mathematics will also find some material for their classes in the book. Each adventure could be used as the foundation for a lecture in some unusual uses of mathematics or the primer that leads to a more detailed investigation of a mathematical topic. This is not a popular work in mathematics, the purpose is to plant a seed of mathematical interest and all of the seeds in the book are viable.

Published in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, reprinted with permission.