ODU's John Adam to Sign New Book Thursday at University Village Bookstore

John Adam, Old Dominion University professor of mathematics, will sign copies of his new work, "A Mathematical Nature Walk," from noon to 1 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 24 at the University Village Bookstore.

The book presents ninety-six questions about many common natural phenomena--and a few uncommon ones--and then shows how to answer them using mostly basic mathematics. Can you weigh a pumpkin just by carefully looking at it? Why can you see farther in rain than in fog? What causes the variations in the colors of butterfly wings, bird feathers and oil slicks? And why are large haystacks prone to spontaneous combustion? These are just a few of the questions you'll find inside. About a quarter of the questions can be answered with arithmetic, and many of the rest require only precalculus. But regardless of math background, readers will learn from the informal descriptions of the problems and gain a new appreciation of the beauty of nature and the mathematics that lies behind it.

Adam is also co-author the bestselling work, "Guesstimation: Solving the World's Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin."