2012 MAA Books Annual Catalog

The 2012 MAA Books Annual Catalog is Now Online

In the catalog, Ivars Peterson, MAA Director of Publications and Communications, talks about this year in MAA Books: 

One of the delights of browsing through a catalog of MAA books is seeing the startling variety of the offerings. Many of our books present mathematics in unexpected contexts or from unusual perspectives. They may be playful in tone, thought-provoking, or inspiring, for your own reading pleasure or in the classroom.

Our new books for 2012 exemplify this wonderful diversity. Beautiful Mathematics by Marin Erickson hops, skips, and jumps across a landscape of numbers, shapes, and abstract patterns to unveil mathematics as an art form. In A Mathematician Comes of Age, Steven G. Krantz presents a provocative, quirky portrait of a mathematician’s life in academia. Sophie’s Diary: A Mathematical Novel by Dora Musielak is not only fiction but also history and mathematics, all wrapped in one package to tell the compelling story of Sophie Germain.

Calculus and Its Origins by David Perkins illuminates the gradual development of the subject (and its focus on the infinite) over centuries, punctuated by the seminal work of Isaac Newton and others. For another perspective on calculus, revel in the broad humor of the video presentation Derivative vs. Integral: The Final Slapdown, with the clown princes of mathematics, Colin Adams and Thomas Garrity, taking sides on the issue.

The Adams and Garrity DVD is just the latest of several videos that we offer. The list includes The Great π/e Debate, The United States of Mathematics Presidential Debate, Hard Problems: The Road to the World’s Toughest Math Contest, and I Want To Be a Mathematician: A Conversation with Paul Halmos. We have published books on CD-ROM (Marin Gardner’s Mathematical Games) and books with software (Oval Track and Other Permutation Puzzles).

 Happy reading,

Ivars Peterson
MAA Director of Publications and Communications