Reaching for the Extreme

From bestselling author and mathematician Ian Stewart, the fascinating story of the extreme problems that have driven math forward from antiquity to today Many of the deepest and most important areas of mathematics have emerged from questions about extremes—the shortest path between two points on a curved surface, the smallest area spanning a wire, or the fewest colors needed to make a map. Mathematicians have been pushing restlessly toward extremes for thousands of years. The isoperimetric prob