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Alcuin's Recreational Mathematics demonstrates the notions of basic mathematics using the 53 problems found in the early ninth-century text
Propositiones ad acuendos juvenes ("Problems to Sharpen the Young") by the famous medieval cleric and teacher Alcuin of York.
About the author
Professor Marcel Danesi is Professor Emeritus of linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto. He directed the Program in Semiotics and, together with various cognitive scientists and mathematicians, founded the CogSci Center for the study of mathematics and mind at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences. He has published considerably in several areas of recreational mathematics and mathematics education. His research examines the relationship between mathematical cognition, language, and the arts.
Summary
Propositiones ad acuendos juvenes (“Problems to Sharpen the Young”) is a ninth-century book written by medieval teacher and scholar Alcuin of York. Today, it has become one of the foundational texts in what is commonly called recreational mathematics. The book has been translated in many languages and analysed from various mathematical angles and perspectives, from contemporary arithmetic and geometry to the nature of sequences. It is not only a collection of ingenious and challenging puzzles, but the core ideas collected in this book have become major themes and branches of mathematics.
Here, Marcel Danesi revisits all fifty-three problems in Alcuin's original text, providing detailed solutions and analyses. Alcuin's Recreational Mathematics examines the problems in the Propositiones in easy-to-follow language, extracting from them the notions and techniques that today constitute basic mathematics. Each chapter discusses Alcuin's problems more broadly, and ends with ten exploratory puzzles based on Alcuin's original problems and related themes. Answers and detailed solutions are included at the back.
Alcuin's Recreational Mathematics demonstrates how Alcuin's Propositiones puts basic mathematical thinking on display via ingenious problems that often require outside-of-the-box thinking, constituting an original and imaginative investigation of mathematics in its essence.
