The Mathematical Coloring Book

Merry-Go-Round.- A Story of Colored Polygons and Arithmetic Progressions.- Colored Plane.- Chromatic Number of the Plane: The Problem.- Chromatic Number of the Plane: An Historical Essay.- Polychromatic Number of the Plane and Results Near the Lower Bound.- De Bruijn-Erd?s Reduction to Finite Sets and Results Near the Lower Bound.- Polychromatic Number of the Plane and Results Near the Upper Bound.- Continuum of 6-Colorings of the Plane.- Chromatic Number of the Plane in Special Circumstances.- Measurable Chromatic Number of the Plane.- Coloring in Space.- Rational Coloring.- Coloring Graphs.- Chromatic Number of a Graph.- Dimension of a Graph.- Embedding 4-Chromatic Graphs in the Plane.- Embedding World Records.- Edge Chromatic Number of a Graph.- Carsten Thomassen's 7-Color Theorem.- Coloring Maps.- How the Four-Color Conjecture Was Born.- Victorian Comedy of Errors and Colorful Progress.- Kempe-Heawood's Five-Color Theorem and Tait's Equivalence.- The Four-Color Theorem.- The GreatDebate.- How Does One Color Infinite Maps? A Bagatelle.- Chromatic Number of the Plane Meets Map Coloring: Townsend-Woodall's 5-Color Theorem.- Colored Graphs.- Paul Erd?s.- De Bruijn-Erd?s's Theorem and Its History.- Edge Colored Graphs: Ramsey and Folkman Numbers.- The Ramsey Principle.- From Pigeonhole Principle to Ramsey Principle.- The Happy End Problem.- The Man behind the Theory: Frank Plumpton Ramsey.- Colored Integers: Ramsey Theory Before Ramsey and Its AfterMath.- Ramsey Theory Before Ramsey: Hilbert's Theorem.- Ramsey Theory Before Ramsey: Schur's Coloring Solution of a Colored Problem and Its Generalizations.- Ramsey Theory before Ramsey: Van der Waerden Tells the Story of Creation.- Whose Conjecture Did Van der Waerden Prove? Two Lives Between Two Wars: Issai Schur and Pierre Joseph Henry Baudet.- Monochromatic Arithmetic Progressions: Life After Van der Waerden.- In Search of Van der Waerden: The Early Years.- In Search of Van der Waerden: The Nazi Leipzig, 1933-1945.- In

Alexander Soifer is a Russian born and educated American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado, an author of some 200 articles on mathematics, history of mathematics, mathematics education, film reviews, etc. He is Senior Vice President of the World Federation of National Mathematics Competitions, which in 2006 awarded him The Paul Erdös Award. 26 years ago Soifer founded has since chaired The Colorado Mathematical Olympiad, and served on both USSR and USA Mathematical Olympiads committees. Soifer's Erdös number is 1.



Springer has contracted his 7 books. "The Mathematical Coloring Book" is coming out in October 2008; 4 books will appear in 2009; followed by "Life and Fate: In Search of Van der Waerden", and a joint book with the late Paul Erdos "Problems of p.g.o.m. Erdos."



The author's previous books were self-published and received many positive reviews, below are excerpts from reviews of "How Does One Cut A Triangle?:





"Why am I urging you to read this? Mainly because it is such a refreshing book. Professor Soifer makes the problems fascinating, the methods of attack even more fascinating, and the whole thing is enlivened by anecdotes about the history of the problems, some of their recent solvers, and the very human reactions of the author to some beautiful mathematics. Most of all, the book has charm, somehow enhanced by his slightly eccentric English, sufficient to carry the reader forward without minding being asked to do rather a lot of work.



I am tempted to include several typical quotations but I'll restrain myself to two: From Chapter 8 "Here is an easy problem for your entertainment. Problem 8.1.2. Prove that for any parallelogram P, S(P)=5. Now we have a new problem, therefore we are alive! And the problem is this: what are all possible values of our newly introduced function S(F)? Can the function S(F) help us to classify geometry

From the reviews:

"It contains a range of combinatorial colouring problems, while those interested in the recent history or the sociology of mathematics will be entertained by lively accounts of the combinatorialists who created and worked on them. ... The book is generally well written and presented, with good diagrams and layout ... . a useful and engaging book." (Robin Wilson, LMS Newsletter, November, 2009)

"This book contains much math of interest and pointers to more math of interest. ... This is a Fantastic Book!. ... The upward closure of the union of the following people: (1) an excellent high school student, (2) a very good college math major, (3) a good grad student in math or math-related field, (4) a fair PhD in combinatories, or (5) a bad math professor. ... Anyone who is interested in math or history of math. This book has plenty of both." (William Gasarch, SIGACT News, Vol. 40 (3), 2010)

"Soifer does a fine job in collating a huge range of sources ... with manyinteresting nuggets and, where necessary, a real determination to set the historical record straight in terms of the appellation of conjectures and theorems. ... The mathematical colouring book is attractively produced and very readable. ... book is likely to be of primary interest to those seeking a historically aware, up-to-date introductory survey of an engaging, and still emerging, field of combinatorial mathematics." (Nick Lord, The Mathematical Gazette, Vol. 95 (532), March, 2011)

"This very nicely presented book, lovingly prepared by the author over a period of 18 years, studies problems involving colored objects, and the Ramsey theory that such problems are imbedded into. ... recommend this book, both for mathematicians and for those who wish to learn more about mathematicians and their subject." (Arthur T. White, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1221, 2011)