Do all problems have solutions? Is complexity synonymous with difficulty? This original collection of mathematical puzzles and paradoxes proves that things aren't always what they seem! Readers will discover that nothing is as easy or as difficult as it looks and that puzzles can have one, several, or no solutions. The fun-filled puzzles begin with The Tricky Hole, a challenge that involves pushing a large coin through a small hole in a sheet of paper without ripping or making any cuts in the paper. Advance to the Elastic Playing Card, in which it's possible to cut a hole into a playing card big enough for someone to climb through. Other incredible puzzles include Elephants and Castles, Trianglized Kangaroo, Honest Dice and Logic Dice, Mind-reading Powers, and dozens more. Complete solutions explain the mathematical realities behind the fantastic-sounding challenges.

In Nonplussed!, popular-math writer Julian Havil delighted readers with a mind-boggling array of implausible yet true mathematical paradoxes. Now Havil is back with Impossible?, another marvelous medley of the utterly confusing, profound, and unbelievable—and all of it mathematically irrefutable. Whenever Forty-second Street in New York is temporarily closed, traffic doesn't gridlock but flows more smoothly—why is that? Or consider that cities that build new roads can experience dramatic increases in traffic congestion—how is this possible? What does the game show Let's Make A Deal reveal about the unexpected hazards of decision-making? What can the game of cricket teach us about the surprising behavior of the law of averages? These are some of the counterintuitive mathematical occurrences that readers encounter in Impossible? Havil ventures further than ever into territory where intuition can lead one astray. He gathers entertaining problems from probability and statistics along with an eclectic variety of conundrums and puzzlers from other areas of mathematics, including classics of abstract math like the Banach-Tarski paradox. These problems range in difficulty from easy to highly challenging, yet they can be tackled by anyone with a background in calculus. And the fascinating history and personalities associated with many of the problems are included with their mathematical proofs. Impossible? will delight anyone who wants to have their reason thoroughly confounded in the most astonishing and unpredictable ways.

This interdisciplinary work deals with the bacterial degradation of organic and inorganic materials such as prosthetic devices and the consequent production of non-engineered nanoparticles (NPs). Focus is put on the interaction of these, often toxic, NPs with the environment, the microorganisms and the host human body. Electron Microscopy is the method of choice to investigate bacterial colonization and degradation of plastic polymers. Hence one section of the book is fully dedicated to the most recent and interesting microscopy technologies in microbiology and soft matters. The final chapter of the book on the complex and multivariate relationships between a microscopist and electron microscopy images is dedicated to Lyubov Vasilievna Didenko (1958 – 2015), a passionate researcher who contributed substantially to the field of Electron Microscopy research and its applications in studying bacterial-polymer interactions. The book addresses researchers and advanced students working in general and clinical microbiology, nanobiology, materials sciences and image analysis fields.

These logic puzzles provide entertaining variations on Gödel's incompleteness theorems, offering ingenious challenges related to infinity, truth and provability, undecidability, and other concepts. No background in formal logic necessary.

Presents a collection of paradoxes from many different areas of math which reveals the math that shows the truth of these and many other unbelievable ideas. This book gives attention to problems from probability and statistics, areas where intuition can easily be wrong. It talks about the history and people associated with many of these problems.

A Classroom-Tested, Alternative Approach to Teaching Math for Liberal Arts Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Problem Solving: An Introduction to Mathematical Thinking uses puzzles and paradoxes to introduce basic principles of mathematical thought. The text is designed for students in liberal arts mathematics courses. Decision-making situations that progress