Master Sun's Problem: A Mathematical Epic 2,000 Years in the Making

A captivating account of how a one-time mathematician cracked a two-thousand-year-old problem and rediscovered the joys of mathematics in the process

Master Sun’s problem—first posed by Sun Bin, a Chinese military strategist and supposed descendent of Sun Tzu, the legendary author of The Art of War—is an ancient strategy question whose elegant simplicity conceals a fiendishly difficult mathematical puzzle. The problem was largely ignored for two thousand years until a college friend of Dana ...