Lost in the Math Museum: A Survival Story

“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.