Lost in the Math Museum: A Survival Story (Anneli Lax New Mathematical Library)

by Colin Adams

“But when I turned the handle on the door, suddenly the buzzing went crazy. I slapped my hands over my ears, when I should have jerked the door shut. It flew open, and I was face-to-face with the Weierstrass function. It was the ugliest function I could imagine, with kinks, and kinks on kinks and kinks on those. And it was shrieking in its buzz-like way, vibrating all over like a plucked string. I stood there, frozen for just a second, and then I was sprinting after the others, with the wild frantic buzzing right behind me.” From the twisted imagination of best-selling author Colin Adams (Zombies & Calculus, The Knot Book) comes this tale of sixteen-year-old Kallie trying to escape death at the hands of the exhibits in a mathematics museum. Kallie crosses paths with Carl Gauss, Bertrand Russell, Sophie Germain, G. H. Hardy, and John von Neumann, as she tries to save herself, her dad, and his colleague Maria from the deadly Hairy Ball theorem, the harrowing Hilbert Hotel, the bisecting Ham Sandwich machine, and a variety of other mathematical menaces. It's a wild romp through a mathematical bestiary featuring the bizarre, the exotic, and the counterintuitive. You'll never think of math the same way again.

209 pages, Paperback

Published July 18, 2022

About the author

A Game Artist and Illustrator, Colin Adams works with pencils, brushes, pens, and digital styluses. Colin lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. His clients range the world of illustration, and include books, magazines, social and mobile games, storyboards, web sites, roleplaying games, and comic books. He has drawn his entire life. He drew a lot in art school, and spent most of his regular school years drawing on his math homework anyway. He has some influences, a few pets, likes avocados, dislikes pennies, and he really couldn’t pick a favorite color, even when pressed.

Reviews

[Kostas Kiousis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting concept, keeps the tension alive, the aliens is a little far fetched and the girl that (once again) comes to save the world already outdated (thanks to the Woke culture), but all in all I enjoyed it, and introduced me to mathematical ideas I had.. no idea about. Could be made into a movie

[Wisconsin Alumni]

Colin Adams MA’80, PhD’83
Author

From the author:
This us the tale of 16-year-old Kallie trying to escape death at the hands of the exhibits in a mathematics museum. Kallie crosses paths with Carl Gauss, Bertrand Russell, Sophie Germain, G. H. Hardy, and John von Neumann, as she tries to save herself, her dad, and his colleague Maria from the deadly Hairy Ball theorem, the harrowing Hilbert Hotel, the bisecting Ham Sandwich machine, and a variety of other mathematical menaces. It's a wild romp through a mathematical bestiary featuring the bizarre, the exotic, and the counterintuitive. You'll never think of math the same way again.