The Mathematics of Juggling - Paperback

by Burkard Polster (Author)

"The Mathematics of Juggling" is the first comprehensive account on juggling tricks and skills, as well as the mathematics behind them. The author wants to help jugglers be systematic about the way they acquire new skills and tricks. He wants to demonstrate that mathematics can be a lot of fun. And he will make people who appreciate the mathematics in this book to also give the practical side of juggling a try. Anybody who is not put off by the word "mathematics" in the title of this book should have a good time reading it.

Back Jacket

Learn to juggle numbers! This book is the first comprehensive account of the mathematical techniques and results used in the modelling of juggling patterns. This includes all known and many new results about juggling sequences and matrices, the mathematical skeletons of juggling patterns.
Many useful and entertaining tips and tricks spice up the mathematical menu presented in this book. There are detailed descriptions of jugglable and attractive juggling sequences, easy zero-gravity juggling, robot juggling, as well as fun juggling of words, anti-balls, and irrational numbers.
The book also includes novel, or at least not very well known connections with topics such as bell ringing, knot theory, and the many body problem. In fact, the chapter on mathematical bell ringing has been expanded into the most comprehensive survey in the literature of the mathematics used by bell ringers.
Accessible at all levels of mathematical sophistication, this is a book for mathematically wired jugglers, mathematical bell ringers, combinatorists, mathematics educators, and just about anybody interested in beautiful and unusual applications of mathematics.