Cows in the Maze – Ian Stewart ****

When I was a teenager I delighted in Martin Gardner’s books like Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions, taken from his Scientific American columns. British mathematician Ian Stewart has taken over Gardner’s role and continues to amaze and boggle the mind with the possibilities of recreational maths in his latest collection.

For me it was rather a mixed bunch. The best were great fun – the worst would only really engage the sort of person who thinks calculating pi by hand is a form of entertainment. I think to some extent Stewart has a problem because Gardner had already picked off the really entertaining, truly amazing stuff, and Stewart is left with either more of the same, or things that aren’t so engaging. Even so it’s an enjoyable read for anyone who finds mathematical puzzles fun – just be prepared to skip over one or two bits.

In a few of the sections Stewart adopts a story-telling form, and these are the weakest, as he’s not a great fiction writer and the result is too whimsical and irritating. Having said that, his three part story approach to time travel is interesting, if rather limited, but would have been so much better without the H. G. Wells pastiche.

In many of his books, Stewart is excellent at explaining obscure maths to the general reader, but for this one I think he assumes just a bit too much knowledge, and his explanations (for example of the symmetry breaking in animal gaits) can be quite confusing. This was particularly unfortunate in his ‘interrogators fallacy’ section where he tries but fails to explain why some arguments used in trials don’t hold up statistically. This chapter needs totally re-writing.

Despite these concerns, there’s much to interest the recreational maths fan. I was delighted to see a piece on what he refers to as ‘bends’ but are what normal people call knots. He has to do this because it’s a classic case of mathematicians living in their own tiny and often irrelevant worlds – according to the standard mathematical definition, a knot is in an infinitely thin line and both ends of the line are joined up. That is not a knot, guys. But this piece by Stewart deals with the maths of real knots.

A mixed bag, then, but there’s enough really good stuff in here to allow it four stars and to suggest than any recreational maths enthusiasts would be mad not to add a copy to their bookshelves.

Paperback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

Search This Blog