Ebook: The Mathematical Coloring Book: Mathematics of Coloring and the Colorful Life of its Creators

I have never encountered a book of this kind. The best description of it I can give is that it is a mystery novel… I found it hard to stop reading before I finished (in two days) the whole text. Soifer engages the reader's attention not only mathematically, but emotionally and esthetically. May you enjoy the book as much as I did!

–Branko Grünbaum

University of Washington

You are doing great service to the community by taking care of the past, so the things are better understood in the future.

–Stanislaw P. Radziszowski, Rochester Institute of Technology

They [Van der Waerden’s sections] meet the highest standards of historical scholarship.

–Charles C. Gillispie, Princeton University

You have dug up a great deal of information – my compliments!

–Dirk van Dalen, Utrecht University

I have just finished reading your (second) article "in search of van der Waerden". It is a masterpiece, I could not stop reading it... Congratulations!

–Janos Pach, Courant Institute of Mathematics

"Mathematical Coloring Book" will (we can hope) have a great and salutary influence on all writing on mathematics in the future.“

–Peter D. Johnson Jr., Auburn University

Just now a postman came to the door with a copy of the masterpiece of the century. I thank you and the mathematics community should thank you for years to come. You have set a standard for writing about mathematics and mathematicians that will be hard to match.

–Harold W. Kuhn, Princeton University

The beautiful and unique Mathematical coloring book of Alexander Soifer is another case of ``good mathematics''… and presenting mathematics as both a science and an art… It is difficult to explain how much beautiful and good mathematics is included and how much wisdom about life is given.

–Peter Mihók, Mathematical Reviews

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This book is dedicated to problems involving colored objects, and to results about the existence of certain exciting and unexpected properties that occur regardless of how these objects are colored. In mathematics, these results comprise the beautiful area known as Ramsey Theory. Wolfram’s Math World defines Ramsey Theory as "the mathematical study of combinatorial objects in which a certain degree of order must occur as the scale of the object becomes large." Ramsey Theory thus includes parts of many fields of mathematics, including combinatorics, geometry, and number theory. This book addresses famous and exciting problems of Ramsey Theory, along with the history surrounding the discovery of Ramsey Theory. In addition, the author studies the life of Issai Schur, Pierre Joseph Henry Baudet and B.L. van der Waerden. In researching this book over the past 14 years, the author corresponded extensively with B.L. van der Waerden, Paul Erdos, Henry Baudet, and many others. As a result, this book will incorporate never before published correspondence and photographs. Historians of mathematics will herein find much new information, along with old errors corrected and published here for the first time in book form. And everyone will experience seeing, for the first time, faces one has not seen before in print, on rare and unique photographs of the creators of the mathematics presented herein, from Francis Guthrie to Frank Ramsey, and documents, such as the one where Adolph Hitler commits a "micromanagement" of firing the Jew, Issai Schur from his job as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Berlin.