Gift Ideas for the Math Lovers You Know

It can be very difficult to find a good gift to give the people closest to you. That challenge can become even more difficult if they’re the kind of people who really like math. What can you give to them that will excite them and, perhaps most importantly for the most enthusiastic among them, they haven’t already gotten for themselves? Or that you haven’t gotten them before?

Speaking of which, let’s recap the very short list of gift ideas we’ve previously suggested, in case you’ve already exhausted those options:

• What to Get a Maths Enthusiast for Christmas (Klein bottle)
• Oddly shaped objects that roll smoothly (oloids)
• Games Mathematicians Play (21X)

This year, we’ll suggest three new options, including two that offer the bonus of being potentially practical. Starting with….

The “Sometimes I Go Off on a Tangent” Coffee Mug

Coffee mugs are inherently practical, and frankly, much easier to drink from than a Klein bottle. This one features a design than illustrates the mathematical concept of tangents, pairing it with a really bad math pun.

Despite the bad mathematical pun, this 11-ounce ceramic mug is microwave and “dishwasher safe”, though handwashing is recommended. Otherwise, it’s a fully practical mug.

Many Amazon reviewers mention buying this mug as a gift for their math teachers. However, if you really knew any math teachers, you would know that 11-ounces of a caffeine-laden beverage isn’t going to cut it for them. Instead, this is a mug in which they can keep their fancy Hagoromo colored chalk on their classroom desk. Right next to the much larger mug from which they will consume their preferred caffeinated beverages.

“The Proof Is in the Pudding” Bowls

These are actual pudding bowls which were created and marketed by “The Unemployed Philosophers Guild”, who love both bad puns and mathematical proofs. Here’s an excerpt of their product description:

• A set of four ceramic pudding bowls with the proofs to classic theorems of Euclid, Hippasus, Pythagoras, and Gauss. Terrific gift for mathematicians, scientists, students, or any geek on your gift list.
• We are not going to lie to you: this one is for the mathematikoi-the inner circle of the school of Pythagoras. If you think all math is rational, you are living in a fool’s paradise.
• These bowls are dangerous-so dangerous that one theorem just might have culminated in murder. (Look it up-Hippasus of Metapontum sleeps with the fishes because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut about the square root of 2).

They’re not kidding when they say these bowls are for the “mathematikoi”, which we think of as those people who like math so much they unironically get tattoos of their favorite formulas. If you know that person, you now know what to get them as a gift.

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe

This is a good introductory book on the topic of calculus, why and how it was invented, and what people use it for. That said, the best and most engaging parts of the book are the ones where author Steven Strogatz breaks away from the math and has fun with the topic at hand. Here’s an example:

All across the world, students are being taught that division by zero is forbidden. They should feel shocked that such a taboo exists. Numbers are supposed to be orderly and well behaved. Math class is a place for logic and reasoning. And yet it’s possible to ask simple things of numbers that just don’t work or make sense. Dividing by zero is one of them.

The root of the problem is infinity. Dividing by zero summons infinity in much the same way that a Ouija board supposedly summons spirits from another realm. It’s risky. Don’t go there.

Strogatz is also the host of Quanta Magazine‘s “The Joy of Why” podcast, the title of which is a riff on his earlier book “The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity. Infinite Powers is very rare math book that falls in between the binary extremes of “too simple” and “too advanced” levels of knowledge needed to enjoy reading them. As such, this book represents a better-than-average gift idea for the majority of maths enthusiasts you may know.

With these gift ideas in hand for perhaps the most difficult person for whom you need to give a present, you can now move on to shop for more normal people!

Image credit: Hands exchanging a gift with a red ribbon photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash.