Book Notes: The Number Mysteries.

This book was broken into five chapters each covering one of the million dollar math problems. The topic of each:

1. The Curious Incident of the Never-ending Primes 
2. The Story of the Elusive Shape
3. The secret of the Winning Streak 
4. The  Case of the Uncrackable code
5. The Quest to Predict the Future

Within each of these chapters there are activities that are online that connect you to concepts that are being discussed in the section. I found these as very good activities to understand what he was talking about.

In chapter one the million dollar question is called Riemann hypothesis.

-Photo Credit https://primes.utm.edu/notes/rh.html

All the examples that I worked on in this chapter were related to how numbers build and will continue to add up in a never ending pattern. 

Chapter 2 

What is the shape of our universe? Seems like a question we get asked in science but this is actually related to math because we have to think about it in a logical way because we can only guess with science. 

This problem was solved but the mathematician  that found the answer didn't accept the million dollars he just likes doing the problem.

Chapter 3

Strategy to beat Rock Paper Scissors .....Where was this when i was growing up??? There are many things in this chapter that I never would have thought of and how it is explains them helped my understanding of things that I learned without having a real understanding of. To start the chapter it asks you to pick five numbers between 1-49 and then it ends with the Winning numbers....I failed but it was an interesting way to get interaction. The final problem is the Traveling sales men which is a type of question I remember getting asked in 341 class. 

Chapter 4

Code breaking....What kid doesn't have dreams about being a spy?

There are many types of codes that are based in math and even if you don't think its based on math i bet you would be interested in that there is some form of math hidden inside your codes. This really was interesting in how to read codes and write them. kinda makes me feel like a spy. 

Chapter 5

Thinking about the Cubs this year makes me wonder if Doc. Brown actually came to the future and found that they would win.....What is chaos? how would we predict chaos? I didn't understand this chapter as much as the others it was a stretch for me to understand where they were going and what they were doing.