Arturo Sangalli – Four Way Interview

Arturo Sangalli has a PhD in mathematics and is the author of The Importance of Being Fuzzy and Pythagoras’ Revenge. A freelance science journalist and writer, he has contributed many pieces to New Scientist.

Why Maths?

I’m a mathematician, so I’m familiar with the subject. Besides, I had written a number of pop maths (and related fields, such as computing) articles and a book.

Why this book?

My first book, The Importance of Being Fuzzy, was rather specialized (fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms). I wanted to reach a larger audience, so a fictional story with maths and some philosophy weaved into it seemed the way to go. The fact that I had no previous experience in fiction writing was an additional challenge, which I welcomed.

What’s next?

Another fictional story, with mathematics and statistics in it, this time applied to one of the social sciences. I don’t want to reveal too much. Ok, perhaps the tentative title: The Chronology Conspiracy.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Apart from promoting Pythagoras’ Revenge, I’m catching up with reading (teaching and writing having occupied most of my time for the past few years): from quantum computing and multiple universes, to various works of fiction and books on the financial crisis and the future of money.

Comments

The Infinite Book – John D. Barrow ****

Authors are often asked to review books on a topic they’ve written on themselves. The reasoning is sensible – they ought to know something about the subject – but there’s always that uneasy suspicion that there’s going to be a bit of bias creeping in. So I think it’s only fair to admit up front that I have written a book on infinity (of which more later). Infinity is a wonderful subject, because it’s intimately mind-bending (if the combination sounds paradoxical, that’s what infinity is all about) and gives you the chance to pull in all sorts of different concepts and assocations along the way, something Barrow does with great gusto. There’s a surprisingly large amount of coverage here for God, and for the universe, and the book jumps around from Aristotle to Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel (explained at great length), from the paradoxes of infinite sets to the paradoxes of time travel. Overall it’s an enjoyable journey that gives plenty of opportunity to be amazed and surprised. The...

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...

The Random Universe - Andrew Jaffe *****

This is an absolutely fascinating book for anyone interested in the way that science really works, bearing in mind the difficulties of having to base our models and theories on induction. Andrew Jaffe introduces the difficulties we face when trying to take a scientific view because largely we are dependent on induction: predicting the future from what has previously been observed. He explores what probability is, the two key ways of looking at it (frequentist and Bayesian) and how scientists use (or misuse it) to work out the implications of their experiments for hypotheses. This is then expanded into looking at the nature of scientific models and the philosophy of science before heading out to entropy, quantum randomness and attempting to achieve meaningful cosmology with its potential dearth of evidence. The topic might sound a little dry, but in fact Jaffe does it with good humour and a very readable style. For example, he uses measuring his daughter's height by making marks on...

Search This Blog