Books by David Wells
“There are about 250 short items, and for me, at least, it is the more oddball ones that really leap off the page. It was here, for instance, that I first came across Malfatti’s problem. This is a conjecture dating from 1803 about the densest way to pack three non-overlapping circles into a triangle, and it took over 100 years for someone to realise that the conjecture itself was completely and utterly wrong. Above all, perhaps, David Wells’s book is great for dipping into, almost at random, with a nice cup of cocoa on a cold winter’s night.” Read more...
David Acheson, Mathematician
Interviews where books by David Wells were recommended
Favourite Maths Books, especially Geometry, recommended by David Acheson
From Thales’s theorem to the Banach-Tarski paradox, Oxford mathematician David Acheson’s book, The Wonder Book of Geometry, is a lively attempt to bring to life geometry—literally, ‘earth measurement’—and make it accessible to the general public. Here, David recommends some of the books that influenced him, “in the order in which I met them, over a timespan of some 60 years.”
