Index of Past Posts

Mathematics has an amazing ability to escape Houdini-like from any box it gets put into, and so doing develops whole new techniques, whole new fields of inquiry.  This blog explores mathematics as the art and science of thinking outside the box.  In this exploration, we shall look at several of the "boxes" that attempted to enclose areas of mathematics, and we shall see how mathematics escaped each box and grew more and more powerful in the process!

 Here is an expanded index of past posts. We are always revisiting and revising these posts, seeking to add more information on each subject:


Box 1:   Pandora's Box  (Pythagoras and the Natural Numbers)

Box 2:   Curved Space?  (Euclidean Geometry)

Box 3:   Zeno, Infinity and Beyond!  (Zeno's Paradoxes) 

Box 4:   Imaginary Numbers Save Lives at Sea!

Box 5:   Marvels of Modular Math

Box 6:   Set for Paradise or Purgatory  (Set Theory) 

Box 7:   The Doughnut and the Coffee Cup  (Topology) 

Box 8:   May As Well Cut Out Group Theory

Box 9:   Cadmus and Harmonia  (Analytical or Co-ordinate Geometry) 

Box 10:   Heat Wave  (Fourier Analysis) 

Box 11:   Artists and Mapmakers  (Projective Geometry) 

Box 12:   Descent Into Chaos  (Fractals and the Mandelbrot Set) 

Box 13:   Gambler's Blues  (Probability Theory) 

Box 14:   Napier's Bones  (Logarithms) 

Box 15:   The Game of Life  (Cellular Automata) 


PDF Versions of the above posts:

The free online site Printfriendly provides a quick and easy way to convert blog posts and other web pages into PDF files for downloading.  I have converted all the above posts to PDFs and they are available here:

Math Blog PDFs from Printfriendly

These PDFs are also available as a single PDF document merged by the free online service PDF24 Tools:

Mathematics - The Art and Science of Thinking Outside the Box