Skip to main content

The Magic of Maths - Arthur Benjamin ***

There are broadly three types of popular maths. There are books like A Brief History of Infinity which introduce mathematical concepts and history without actually doing any maths - and these can be fascinating. There are books of recreational maths, like Martin Gardner's classic Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions, or Ian Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, which explore the weird and wonderful of maths, with a need for a bit of practical working out, but almost always provide plenty of fun along the way. And there are book like the Magic of Maths. (Could I say, by the way, how grateful I am that the UK edition has that 's' on 'maths'.) Almost always written by mathematicians, such books set out to prove to the masses who think that actually getting your hands dirty and doing mathematics is too hard or too boring that it's really easy and enjoyable too.
To give him his due, Arthur Benjamin makes a good stab at this - one of the best I've seen. He tells us we're going to learn clever little tricks that will allow us to do amazing things with mental arithmetic - for instance multiplying surprisingly big numbers in our heads. And he delivers. It really works, and we can amaze ourselves, though probably not our friends, because if other readers are anything like me they will have forgotten most of the techniques by the time they finish the next chapter.
Benjamin also takes on the likes of algebra, Fibonacci numbers, geometry, trigonometry, imaginary numbers, calculus and more. And going on the pages of testimonials from maths professors in the front, this is the kind of thing maths-heavy people love. And that's fine. But for most of us I'd say 80 per cent of the book is not going to be appreciated. Early on, Benjamin tells us we shouldn't mind skipping pages or even chapters. But when you find yourself skipping most of the content, it begins to feel as if it wasn't a great thing to read in the first place.
In one of those fruitless exercises in saying the whole world is your audience, Benjamin comments that the book is for anyone who will one day take a maths course, is taking a maths course or is finished taking maths courses. I'd say the audience is a lot tighter. It's for people who one day will take a maths degree, or took one years ago and wants to reminisce. It's just too number heavy and narrative light to work for me. And I have taken a maths course. But I certainly don't want take another - and this has reminded me why.
I have to emphasise that the book is by no means all bad. Benjamin does introduce some fun, and weird and wonderful stuff, like the apparent demonstration that infinity is equal to -1/12 (though I've seen better explanations of why this demonstration falls apart). But far too often what Benjamin thinks is fun is just 'So what?' to us lesser mortals.
Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are
Post a Comment
Read more

Space Oddities - Harry Cliff *****

In this delightfully readable book, Harry Cliff takes us into the anomalies that are starting to make areas of physics seems to be nearing a paradigm shift, just as occurred in the past with relativity and quantum theory. We start with, we are introduced to some past anomalies linked to changes in viewpoint, such as the precession of Mercury (explained by general relativity, though originally blamed on an undiscovered planet near the Sun), and then move on to a few examples of apparent discoveries being wrong: the BICEP2 evidence for inflation (where the result was caused by dust, not the polarisation being studied),  the disappearance of an interesting blip in LHC results, and an apparent mistake in the manipulation of numbers that resulted in alleged discovery of dark matter particles. These are used to explain how statistics plays a part, and the significance of sigmas . We go on to explore a range of anomalies in particle physics and cosmology that may indicate either a breakdown i
Post a Comment
Read more

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re
Post a Comment
Read more