Maria Miller has written reviews of the geometry books in the Dr. Math series. She writes:

"Enjoyable reading. Excellent down-to-earth explanations. Right price. I don't know how else to put this book in words. Just like the algebra books, Dr. Math's geometry books are very easy reading, with light tone, clear layout, and humorous cartoons by Jessica Wolk-Stanley. But the best part is of course that the explanations to math questions are superb, accurate, and clear.

"Dr. Math books don't really read like a textbook but something much better; the reader feels much more involved in the text. I feel the authors and the compilers have done an excellent job in readability of all of the Dr. Math books."

In her review she goes on to explain why she feels that way.

Want to Take Dr. Math with You?

http://mathforum.org/pubs/dr.mathbooks.html

View the full table of contents of the four books in the Dr. Math series.

His site chronicles their trip, including:

• Welcome
• This Trip
• The Route
• Video Interview
• Trip Blog
• Randy's Blog
• About Scott
• Sketchpad
• Fathom
• Sketchpad Challenge
• Photos 1, 2, 3, and 4

http://www.mathematicaguidebooks.org/soccer/

With the World Cup under way, Michael Trott was asked by American Scientist magazine to help with some graphics to illustrate their feature article, "The Topology and Combinatorics of Soccer Balls," by Dieter Kotschick. Michael explains, "Using various code pieces from the GuideBooks about tori, polyhedra, knots, Riemann surfaces, and the Weierstrass elliptic function, I created the graphics shown in the article."

Michael did some further tinkering with Mathematica and came up with six animations of soccer balls morphing from and into a variety of shapes:

• TorusMorph.mov
• SlitTorus.mov
• TrefoilToSoccer.mov
• SoccerUnfolding.mov
• Breathing.mov
• TrefoilExplosion.mov

View the American Scientist article:

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/51965