I just got my new copy of Mathematical Circles in the mail. What happened to the old copy? It was lost by the U.S. Postal Service in the mail from California to Alabama. Actually, replaced would be a better word. I got the box it shipped in, but nearly all my books were removed and replaced with somebody else’s stuff.

I do not plan to repurchase every book I lost, but Mathematical Circles is a must for any teacher working with top middle and high school students. It lightly covers many of the topics ordinarily left out of a pre-college math education with problems that can be tackled in discussion by kids in middle or high school (number theory, graph theory, parity, the pigeon-hole principle, etc.). There is a very good game section, and I run games with my Math Explorers students for about twenty minutes in nearly every class.

Mathematical Circles is also a great book for top students preparing for MATHCOUNTS or the AMC exams.