The book "Five-Minute Mathematics" contains 100 articles. They appeared - in German - during the years 2003 and 2004 as a regular column in the German newspapers "Die Welt" and "Berliner Morgenpost".
The book first appeared as "Fünf Minuten Mathematik" in German. It was translated to English in 2008 by the AMS. Besides the English translation also a Japanese and a French version are available, and Italian, Korean, Russian and Turkish translations are in preparation.
The complete contents of "Five-Minute Mathematics" can be found below. More details can be found here.
You Can't Beat the Odds
Magical Mathematics: The Integers
How Old Is the Captain?
Vertiginously Large Prime Numbers
Loss Plus Loss Equals Win
When It Comes to Large Numbers, Intuition Fails
The Key for Encryption Is in the Telephone Book
The Village Barber Who Shaves Himself
Quit While You're Ahead?
Can a Monkey Create Great Literature?
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The Birthday Paradox
Horror Vacui
Sufficient Difficulties with the Logic of Mathematics Are in Fact a Necessity
To Change or Not to Change? The Goat Problem
In Hilbert's Hotel There Is Always a Vacancy
That Fascinating Number Pi
How Random Events Become Calculable Quantities
How Are the Prime Numbers Distributed?
The Five-Dimensional Cake
One Night Stand
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Fly Me to the Moon
Using Residues
Top Secret!
Magical Mathematics: Order amidst Chaos
How Does One Approach Genius?
On Semitones and Twelfth Roots
Why Am I Always Standing in the Wrong Line?
Zero: An Undeservedly Underrated Number
I Love to Count!
Genius Autodidact: The Indian Mathematician Ramanujan
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I Hate Mathematics Because ...
The Traveling Salesman: A Modern Odyssey
Squaring the Circle
A Step into the Infinite
Mathematics in Your CD Player
The Logarithm: A Dying Breed
Prizeworthy Mathematics
Why Axioms of All Things?
Proof by Computer?
The Lottery: The Small Prizes
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Formulas = Concentrated Thought
Endless Growth
How Do Quanta Compute?
Extremes!
Infinitely Small?
Mathematical Observations at the Fire Department
The First Mathematical Proof Is 2500 Years Old
There Is Transcendence in Mathematics, Though It Has Nothing to Do with Mysticism
Is Every Even Number the Sum of Two Primes?
Why We Invert Conditional Probabilities Incorrectly
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Millionaire or Billionaire?
Mathematics and Chess
"The Book of Nature Is Written in the Language of Mathematics"
The Search for Mersenne Primes
Berlin, Eighteenth Century: A Beautiful Formula is Discovered
The First Really Complicated Number
P = NP: Is Luck Sometimes Unnecessary?
Happy 32nd Birthday!
Buffon's Needle
Running Hot and Cold: Controlled Cooling Solves Optimization Problems
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Who Didn't Pay?
What Can Statistics Tell Us?
Arbitrage
Farewell to Risk: Options
Is Mathematics a Reflection of the World?
Mathematics That You Can Hear
Chance as Composer
Do Dice Have a Guilty Conscience?
Strawberry Ice Cream Can Kill You!
Prosperity for All!
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No Risk, Thank You!
A Nobel Prize in Mathematics?
Chance as Reckoner: Monte Carlo Methods
Fuzzy Logic
Secret Messages in the Bible?
How Knotted Can a Knot Be?
How Much Mathematics Does a Person Need?
Big, Bigger, Biggest
It Is Probably Correct
Is the World a Crooked Place?
***
Is There a Mathematical Bureau of Standards?
The Butterfly That Fluttered By
Guaranteed to Make You Rich
Don't Trust Anyone over Thirty
Equality in Mathematics
Magical Invariants
Mathematics Goes to the Movies
The Lazy Eight: Infinity
Books Need Bigger Margins!
Visualizing Internal Organs with Mathematics
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A Brain in the Computer
Cogito, Ergo Sum
Does the World Have a Hole?
Complex Numbers Are Not So Complex as Their Name Suggests
M. C. Escher and Infinity
A One at the Beginning Is Much More Likely Than a Two