Take an apple and cut it into five pieces. Would you believe that these five pieces can be reassembled in such a fashion so as to create two apples equal in shape and size to the original? Would you believe that you could make something as large as the sun by breaking a pea into a finite number of pieces and putting it back together again? Neither did Leonard Wapner, author of The Pea and the Sun, when he was first introduced to the Banach-Tarski paradox, which asserts exactly such a notion. Written in an engaging style, The Pea and the Sun catalogues the people, events, and mathematics that contributed to the discovery of Banach and Tarski's magical paradox. Wapner makes one of the most interesting problems of advanced mathematics accessible to the non-mathematician.

Join two curious kids as they explore their backyard, and contemplate their place within our vast universe in this adorable picture book that’s full of comparisons to help kids understand cosmic size. If Pluto was a pea… the Sun would be like a tent, Mercury would be a marble, and Earth would be a golf ball. Pluto is the smallest planet in our solar system, but how small is small? As it turns out, it only takes the contents of a lunchbox and a backyard to find out.

In a small garden near the great city of Beijing, five peas rest patiently in the same shell. As the peas grow, so do their dreams. One pea longs to fly to the sun and another to the moon. Two more hope to dine with the emperor. But it is the smallest pea whose journey transforms the life of a mother and daughter. Exquisite paintings on rice paper and eloquent retelling bring together Eastern and Western traditions and lend new meaning to a familiar story.

Presents 33 essays on such topics as statistics and the design of experiments, group theory, the mathematics of infinity, the mathematical way of thinking, the unreasonableness of mathematics, and mathematics as an art. A reprint of volume 3 of the four-volume edition originally published by Simon and Schuster in 1956. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

This book represents 50 years of collecting anecdotes, starting at Oxford University at the end of its golden age of developing the personality as well as the brain. So different from nowadays where Britains left wing conservative government requires the worlds best known University to waste its money and time explaining to stupid schoolchildren who wont apply because they think they will be murdered because the Inspector Morse murder mysteries are set In Oxford, that they are fiction- pupils this stupid dont deserve any university education. It goes forward to 2013, with a big airport denying there is an airline called British Airways, and the potential sighting of the ghost of a cowled monk in an ancient churchyard. Geographically it includes the little visited countries of Kazakhstan (a real anecdote, not the silliness of Borat) and the tiny coral Cook Islands in the middle of the Pacific.