For more than forty years, readers have turned to this book for an introduction to mathematical concepts. Using striking photographs and diagrams, H. Steinhaus ingeniously explains mathematical phenomena, beginning with simple puzzles and games and moving to more advanced problems. Now available for the first time on paperback, this edition contains the full text of the revised and enlarged Third American Edition and a new preface by Professor Morris Kline of New York University.
In presenting this book to the reader, I should like to avoid the misunderstanding that any mathematician risk when he addresses himself to non-specialists. My purpose is neither to teach, in the usual sense of the word, nor to amuse the reader with some charades. One fine summer day it happened that I was asked this question: ""You claim to be a mathematician; well, what does one do all day when one is a mathematician?"" We were seated in a park, my questioner and I, and I tried to explain to him a few geometric problems, solved and unsolved, using a stick to draw on the gravel pathway a Jordan curve, or a Peano curve... That was how I conceived this book, in which the sketches, diagrams, and photographs provide a direct language and allow proofs to be avoided or at least reduced to a minimum.