Skip to main content

1089 and All That – David Acheson *****

I really don’t know what’s happened to OUP – there was a time when this academic publisher had great ideas for science books, but the books themselves were practically unreadable. Now they’ve had a string of top notch titles – to which this is both a recent and an early addition, as the first edition of this book slipped under the radar back in 2002, but now it’s out in paperback and ready to wow a wider audience.

For non-UK (and younger) readers, the title is a play on 1066 and All That, a humorous book on history that was very popular in the 1950s. Here, though, the topic is mathematics, and rather than mock the subject, as 1066 does, the approach here is to demonstrate the delight of maths done right. The author could just have easily gone for a 1970s appeal and called this The Joy of Maths – because a joy it truly is.

There is a slightly dated feel about the book, both in its presentation and style that, for me at least, is not a bad thing, but rather 100% nostalgia. It starts with a reference to the I-Spy books, a big part of my childhood. And then there are the illustrations. When I was young my father subscribed to a magazine called the Model Engineer. Usually full of serious articles about doing things with lathes to produce working scale models of steam engines, it was dull as ditchwater for me and I avoided it like the plague, except the Christmas edition. Here there was usually a story of the adventures of a lunatic model engineer, building the kind of contraptions that would later feature on Wallace and Grommit. The illustrations were surreal photographs that were somehow old fashioned and downright weird at the same time – and that’s exactly the same feel the illustrations here have. On one page we’ll have a cartoon, on another a photograph of a model railway, on one of the buildings of which is a poster announcing ‘Brighten your day the Geometry way!’

However, this period feel doesn’t extend to a dull approach to the topic – instead, David Acheson really does make maths – and it’s by no means all fun, recreational maths, but often the real thing – both approachable and entertaining. There are snippets of geometry and algebra, infinite series and chaos theory, trigonometry and the Indian rope trick (no, really, there is applied maths here, in a very strange way). There’s no attempt to cover any of these topics in depth – we just get a quick feel for them, plus one or two illustrations of particularly interesting, mindbending, useful, or just strange applications. I was least enthusiastic about the trigonometry, but most of it just shot past in an entertaining stream.
Popular maths is not easy to do, but David Acheson has really achieved it with this pocket-sized gem of a book. I read it in one sitting, and I think you will too.
Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more