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Nonplussed!: Mathematical Proof of Implausible Ideas 1st Edition

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Julian Havil (Author)
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Julian Havil (Author)
3 out of 5 stars 9 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0691120560
ISBN-10: 0691120560
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 216 pages
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press; 1st edition (April 8, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0691120560
  • ISBN-13: 978-0691120560
  • Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #609,693 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Fascinating
By Robert Pelini on November 7, 2007
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
This book will delight readers who like to get their hands into their math. Havil sticks to mostly elementary concepts, avoiding highly abstract fields that would lose most readers. When a subject could go too far afield, Havil warns about it and presents only the part the reader needs to know, citing original source references for the interested reader. He gives complete, understandable proofs of some startling statements--proofs that leave you understanding exactly how you got there. The great thing is that you can choose to work through these problems for yourself, verifying each step, or you can just follow along with his proofs and take on faith any simple algebraic rearrangements that he may have skipped over. Compared to Havil's earlier classic on Euler's Gamma Function, this one's a bit easier to read, with numerous short sections on a variety of topics.

One minor complaint is that I found some typesetting errors. One, ironically, occurs on page 49 where he uses the notation "!n" (the number of derangements of n objects) when actually he meant "n!" (the number of permutations of n objects). It's ironic because only two paragraphs later Havil warns that !n can be easily confused with n!, whereupon he adopts a new notation for !n. In the delightfully bizarre but challenging chapter on John Conway's Fractran, there are a few typos that might confuse that minority of readers who will actually try to go line-by-line through the explanation of the Fractran machine (p. 172), but if you're one of those people, discovering the errors will anyway prove your mastery.
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26 of 31 people found the following review helpful
A real brain teaser
By O. De Vries on May 16, 2007
Format: Hardcover
The book of Julian Havil is certainly not easy reading. Perhaps I am a dummy, but at several pages I had to read over a paragraph several times before understanding its real meaning, but the result was always worth the trouble. The calculations itself are explained thoroughly and his way of highlighting different sidesteps are often eye-openers.

People loving Martin Gardner's articles in Scientific American, will certainly appreciate this book.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Good book, but contains some basic errors
By Gary Sawyer on June 6, 2013
Format: Paperback
This was a good read, although the writing style could have been more precise at times. The choice of
topics was varied, and most of the chapters presented interesting topics, especially the Banach-Tarski paradox.
Through no fault of the author, several of the topics would not be very accessible to those without fairly extensive
math backgrounds. There were a couple of blatant errors of fact, which I cannot fathom not being caught by even a cursory proofreading. For example, in Chapter 7, he states, "if Q [the rationals] is countable and R [the reals]not so, then what has been added - the transcendental numbers - must not be countable." What you add to the rationals to get the set of real numbers is the irrational numbers (of which the transcendental numbers are but a subset). For a mathematical piece, even a light exposition, that was sloppy - and inaccurate. Picky? Perhaps, but there were a couple of those, and frankly, in a math book, even popular interest, that is inexcusable.
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9 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Fun, but more esoteric than Impossibles (sequel?)
By C. Livingston on September 13, 2008
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
I read Impossibles first and really enjoyed it a lot. This was also enjoyable, but I found myself skimming over the proofs much of the time. I did not do that with Impossibles (but I don't remember there being as much). The problems discussed were ineresting, but I did not find myself telling my other geek friends about very many.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Hard to enjoy
By Robert P. Heaney on August 20, 2012
Format: Kindle Edition
Reproduction of the equations was so poor as to be difficult to read or follow them - at least in the version I purchased. I imagine they were reproduced as figures, rather than as type, which seems a serious mistake for a book of this sort.
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