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EDITORIAL INFORMATION

How long is the coast of Britain? How many colors are necessary to color in any map so that two adjacent regions share the same color? How can one (mathematically) tell a reef knot from a granny knot? These questions seem simple enough, yet attempting to answer them in proper mathematical terms has sparked some mind-bending and often revolutionary developments in the world of mathematics. In Mathematics: The New Golden Age, Keith Devlin, a research mathematician and popular commentator on mathematical topics, offers a non-technical guided tour of the significant developments in the field of mathematics since 1960-revised and enlarged to encompass the dramatic advances of the 1980s and 1990s.

Why a "new golden age"? According to Keith Devlin, we are currently witnessing an astronomical amount of mathematical research. Charting the most significant developments that have taken place in mathematics since 1960, Devlin expertly describes these advances for the interested layperson and adroitly summarizes their significance as he leads the reader into the heart of the most interesting mathematical perplexities-from the biggest known prime number to the Shimura-Taniyama conjecture for Fermat's Last Theorem.

The book also includes major new sections on knots and topology, and the mathematics of the physical universe.

(Extracted from the press release).

GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS

-Contents.
-Preface.

-Acknowledgments.

-1. Primer Numbers, Factoring, and Secret Codes.

-2. Sets, Infinity, and the Undecidable.

-3. Number Systems and the Class Number Problem.

-4. Beauty from Chaos.

-5. Simple Groups.

-6. Hilbert's Tenth Problem.

-7. The Four-Color Problem.

-8. Hard Problems About Complex Numbers.

-9. Knots, Topology, and the Universe.

-10. Fermat's Last Theorem.

-11. The Efficiency of Algorithms.

-Index.