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Sometimes it is nice to get a less technical paper on mathematics to read and learn something different for a change. These papers often make us discover some new curiosity, to think about the process of learning mathematics or even about mathematics itself and this could be a really nice way to quickly 'scape' our daily problems to amuse ourselves with what I will call here recreational mathematics. As an example, I could mention this paper discussing our unability of seeing beyond three dimensions, which is something really curious. What are other interesting recreational mathematical papers to read during our break time?

Note: Maybe the term 'recreational' fits better when applied to puzzles or something like this but I didn't know what else to call it.

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    $\begingroup$ the Wikipedia entry on this topic has a great many pointers, including a journal devoted entirely to recreational math papers; for MO this question seems a bit unfocused, don't you think so? $\endgroup$
    – Carlo Beenakker
    Commented May 2, 2020 at 8:37
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    $\begingroup$ Sounds like a "here's my opinion, what else" post, which somewhat constraints the replying to follow your way of thought. Actually for me the way I like to learn about "recreational" mathematics is to think about them rather than reading (this morning I thought a while about this question, which I can consider as doing "recreational math during my break time"— also assuming that one really wants to draw a line between one's time for research and one's math for break. $\endgroup$
    – YCor
    Commented May 2, 2020 at 11:10
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    $\begingroup$ There is a series of books entitled The Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects, Volume N, where so far $N$ has taken on the values $1,2,3$. $\endgroup$
    – Gerry Myerson
    Commented May 2, 2020 at 12:56
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    $\begingroup$ I’m voting to close because this is a very, very wide “big-list” question: there are hundreds of papers out there that fit this bill, and nothing apart from personal preference to make any of them more appropriate to this question than any others. $\endgroup$
    – Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine
    Commented May 2, 2020 at 21:39

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Two of my favorite recreational papers are:

J-F Mestre, R Schoof, L Washington and D Zagier, Quotients homophones des groupes libres. Homophonic quotients of free groups Experiment. Math. 2 (1993), no. 3, 153–155.

Norman Wildberger, Real fish, real numbers, real jobs, The Mathematical Intelligencer 21(2), (June 1999), 4-7. Here is a youtube recording of the author reading this paper.

In fact the Intelligencer and the American math monthly have many papers of this type. Also a mainstream mathematical journal St Peterburg Mathematical Journal has a permanent department "Easy reading for professionals".

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