Mathematics for the Public

Summary

“With some astonishment Hans discovered how different all things looked to his friend than to him. Nothing was abstract for Heilner, nothing he could not have imagined and coloured with his fantasy. When this was impossible he turned away, bored. Mathematics, as far as he was concerned, was a Sphinx charged with deceitful puzzles whose cold malicious gaze transfixed her victims, and he gave the monster a wide berth.”

Hermann Hesse, Beneath the wheel Bantham, 1970.

“Bridge is much more than a game of inference and logic than of mathematics.

Steve Becker, Contract bridge Toronto Globe and Mail, February 25, 1989.

“Finally, we call attention to one additional aspect of the preceding analysis which may be of interest to teachers of mathematics. This is the fact that our result provides a handy counter-example to some of the stereo-types which non-mathematicians believe mathematics to be concerned with.

Most mathematicians at one time or another have probably found themselves in a position of trying to refute the notion that they are people with a “head for figures”, or that they “know a lot of formulas”. At such times it may be convenient to have an illustration at hand to show that mathematics need not be concerned with figures, either numerical or geometrical. For this purpose we recommend the statement and proof of our Theorem 1 [There always exists a stable set of marriages].