School maths is not the interesting part. The real fun is elsewhere. Like a magpie Ian Stewart has collected the most enlightening entertaining & vexing curiosities of maths over the years
- now the private collection is displayed in his cabinet. There are some hidden gems of logic geometry & probability
- like how to extract a cherry from a cocktail glass (harder than you think) a pop up dodecahedron the real reason why you cant divide anything by zero & some tips for making money by proving the obvious. Scattered among these are keys to unlocking the mysteries of Fermats last theorem the Poincare Conjecture chaos theory & the P/NP problem for which a million dollar prize is on offer. There are beguiling secrets about familiar names like Pythagoras or prime numbers as well as anecdotes about great mathematicians. Pull out the drawers of the Professors cabinet & who knows what could happen?