Sheshagiri Rao’s maiden book is a memoir—about a teacher who altered his perspective of a subject and turned his life around. Rao, an education specialist, shows us that any subject can be made interesting to the students if the teacher wills it so. The book is a recollection of his school days in Baldwin Boys’ High School, Bangalore, where a certain mathematics teacher, Mattur Venkatadri Channakeshava or Channa as he is better known, turned the maths class from being a place of rote learning and dreary problems to one of intellectual thinking and appreciation of beauty in the world around us. Through Channa we are introduced to some of the fascinating mathematical puzzles such as Bhaskaracharya’s Lilavati Problems, the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg, the Four-Color Problem, the Barber’s Paradox, the 350-year-old conundrum of Fermat. The author adds a few of these in the notes section too.
November 2018, volume 42, No 11