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The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...
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Govert Schilling - Five Way Interview

Govert Schilling is an acclaimed and prize-winning freelance astronomy writer and broadcaster in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dutch newspapers and magazines, but he also has written for New Scientist, Science and BBC Sky at Night Magazine, and he is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope. He wrote dozens of books (including a couple of children’s books) on a wide variety of astronomical topics, many of which have been translated into English, German, Italian, and Chinese, among other languages. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named asteroid 10986 Govert after him, and in 2014, he received the David N. Schramm Award for high-energy astrophysics science journalism from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.His latest book is Target Earth . Why science? We live in troubling times. Fake news and conspiracy theories abound, and trust in science is diminishing. Many adults don't seem to realize that almost everythi...
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White Light - Jack Lohmann ***

There's a real shortage of popular chemistry titles, which made this book seem very appealing, but unfortunately that's not what it is. There is far more on fertiliser than phosphorus in its own right, interspersed with folksy site meetings that add little more than atmosphere. Sometimes the deviation from topic is dramatic. For example, the treatment of small boat illegal immigrants by Australia, sending them to a camp on Nauru, takes up around 10 pages without a mention of phosphorus. This is a social and political history book with a light seasoning of science.  All too often this deviation from topic occurs - for example in chapter 1 we get a story of nineteenth century agricultural arson in East Anglia and the life of John Henshaw for around four pages, followed by a similar amount on geology. Even the very opening, which makes use of a decaying whale in the ocean (and throws in the nature of near death experiences) seems to meander far from the subject. This isn't hel...
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The Last Murder at the End of the World (SF) - Stuart Turton *****

Usually a mystery novel is based on a straightforward puzzle - whodunnit (or occasionally howdunnit). But now and again you get a mystery that's far more sophisticated, where initially the reader hasn't a clue what's going on. The master of such books was the late Gene Wolfe with novels like Free Live Free and There are Doors . These were fantasies, but Stuart Turton achieves a similar level of intriguing, slowly revealed complexity in a science fiction novel (though it feels quite fantasy-like with an Arthur C. Clarkesque 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' way.) Of course, anyone can write something that is bafflingly incomprehensible. What made Wolfe's, and now Turton's work so special is that the initial confusion doesn't put the reader off - instead we are drawn enthusiastically into the web of the mystery.  Turton takes us to an island where the only survivors of a worldwide, life-destroying 'fog' are kep...
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The Secret World of Flexagons - Scott Sherman, Yossi Elran and Ann Schwartz ***

A great book for the right audience. When I was a teenager I loved Martin Gardner's Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions books. They combined mathematical oddities, such as there being more than one size of infinity, with numerical tricks and some physical maths-based objects, most notably flexagons. As someone who is physically inept, I never got much beyond a basic hexaflexagon, but these paper-based three dimensional structures that could change shape when manipulated, a bit like more sophisticated versions of paper fortune tellers, were fascinating. Now we have a chunky, large format title exploring flexagons in far more depth. The first part of the book takes us into different flexagon structures and the range of possibilities enabling flexing. Some of these require quite sophisticated manipulation of the paper structure (which I did struggle with somewhat, being clumsy). Each flexagon type comes with a flat template to reproduce. These are sometimes quite small and for me ben...
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Numbercrunch - Oliver Johnson ***

A classic curate's egg of a book. Some aspects of it are brilliant, but there is enough that isn't to make it frustrating. Wisely, Oliver Johnson decided to do a book on very practical aspects of maths - applications that are a wonderful counter to the old moan at school of 'but what use is it to me?' This is great, but two aspects are less positive. One is that this would be a sensible argument if we taught school students this stuff. Just as I think we should teach interesting physics, this is genuinely interesting maths that doesn't necessarily involve more work to learn the basics. But we don't. The second issue is that Johnson decided to do maths without formulae and equations. This is a common enough practice in popular science, where you can often get away without the mathematics, but in popular maths it is a real stumbling block. When, for example, Johnson is telling us about Bayesian methods - really useful stuff - rather than presenting us a with a ver...
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Innovators - Donald Kirsch ***

This was a difficult review to write. The idea is a good one - sixteen innovative scientists whose ideas were first doubted but came to be mainstream thinking. Donald Kirsch does a good job of making their work accessible. The focus is heavily biased towards medical science (reflecting the author's background) with the likes McClintock, Semmelweis, Rous, Prusiner, Cushman and Ondetti, Sehgal and Warren and Marshall. If most of these names are unfamiliar, I'd also suggest that most aren't as transformative as the likes of Galileo, Planck, and Wegener, but they still provide interesting stories. I'm not sure I would have included Rachel Carson, who despite being a scientist isn't well known for visionary science (and whose advocacy resulted in the abandonment of DDT, even in controlled fashion that could have saved many lives). But my big concern about the book is the result of two others names already mentioned above. These are the ones I know a significant amount ab...
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