UNDER what circumstances does a suspect’s confession increase the chance that they are innocent? What is the smallest fence you can build around a square patch of land to stop someone seeing across it? Is it possible to build a maze composed of rules and instructions rather than yew bushes? These are just some of the “mathematical explorations” – some serious, others delightfully trivial – tackled by Cows in the Maze, a collection of 21 stand-alone chapters that originally appeared as columns in Scientific American.
Be warned: this is not a book you can casually flick through. To get to grips with the underlying mathematics – usually…
