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?
  • ***
  • 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
  • ***
  • 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
  • ***
  • 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
  • ***
  • 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
  • ***
  • 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
  • ***
  • 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!
  • ***
  • 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
  • ***
  • 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
  • The Leipzig Town Hall and the Sunflower
  • Information Optimally Packaged
  • Four Colors Suffice!
  • Mathematics Makes Billionaires
  • ***

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