Skip to main content

Cracking Mathematics - Colin Beveridge ****

This kind of book is puzzling, though as we shall discover, Cracking Mathematics is a particularly effective example of the genre. Generally, it's difficult to be sure what a book like this is for, a bafflement not helped in this case by the Zen subtitle 'you, this book and 4,000 years of theories'.

The kind of book I'm talking about is a heavily illustrated summary of a big scientific subject - in this case the whole of mathematics - often covering each topic in as little as a pair of pages with sufficient pictures that the text can only ever be very summary. I can see this format would appeal as a gift book, something to give someone who is difficult to buy for, but I struggle to get a feel for why you would want to sit down and read a book like this from cover to cover - yet it's not a reference book either.

Such books are often big coffee table numbers, but the books in this particular series come in a virtually pocket-sized format - smart hardbacks just 17.5x15 centimetres, so they are far more manageable as, say, a loo book, or something to keep in your bag for boring journeys to keep yourself entertained. And perhaps that format is part of the reason why this particular example works so well - that and some genuinely interesting text from Colin Beveridge.

Along the way, Beveridge takes us on a journey through the origins of mathematics, the renaissance, with the introduction of negative and imaginary numbers, calculus and the infinitesimal, powers and logs, the infinite, codes and some of the more exotic modern ideas. Unlike some of the summary maths texts I've read, it isn't a collection of dull facts, but provides plenty of little gems along the way, from the 20,000 year old Ishango bone to the mysteries of elliptic curves and John Conway's Game of Life. Sometimes the format is a little forced - there's a section labelled 'The Curious Maths of Alice in Wonderland' which certainly does contain some Dodgson maths, but equally includes things like quaternions and non-Euclidian geometry, where the connection to Lewis Carroll, let alone Alice, is rather weak.

In other places, the attempt to make the discussion populist overstretches a little. There is some great material on games and probability, with, for instance, an really good description of the famous Monty Hall problem and the controversy it caused in Parade magazine - but quite why there is a double page spread on poker player Chris 'Jesus' Ferguson, even if he did apply game theory to poker, is a little baffling. My general feeling about this was 'So what?'

Maths is often portrayed as a very dry subject - a necessary evil, rather than something to enjoy - and when maths enthusiasts such as Ian Stewart try to make it seem that mathematics is pure fun they can often misunderstand what the general reader actually finds entertaining, or even faintly interesting. Beveridge does not fall into this trap, and consistently gives us interesting material - in part because the book focusses on the people involved and the history of maths as much as it does on the actual mathematics. Because of this, this title lifts itself above the other books of this type that I've read to make it feel that it really is worth popping into your bag to lighten your next wait at the station.


Hardback 

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

Comments

  1. Just browsed a few pages and was appalled to read Pythagoras "threw Hippasus into the Mediterranean". That is rubbish! I hope the rest is better researched.

    ReplyDelete
  2. To be fair it says 'The story goes...' 'it is said...' and 'myths abound' - the idea of Hippasus being drowned is a well-known story that will inevitably be included (admittedly I've never seen it attributed to Pythagoras before). Beveridge takes a light approach throughout and this can sometimes bring a slight looseness of language.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Experimenting with Religion - Jonathan Jong *****

The idea of experiments related to religion may seem more than a little odd, but Jonathan Jong's exploration of a small but significant corner of the psychological landscape is genuinely fascinating. The aim is not to somehow prove or disprove religious beliefs, but rather to get a better understanding of what we really believe and what, if anything, influences those beliefs. Since the replication crisis, which has showed that the results of many classic psychology experiments were dubious, I've been suspicious of all claims for new discoveries in the field. What's excellent about the way that Jong approaches it is that he doesn't cover things up (all too often, pop psychology books don't even mention the crisis), but rather openly discusses it. In fact, several of the studies discussed here have proved unreproducible - this is what makes the book particularly interesting. It doesn't just operate at the level of the findings - it tells us how the experiments wer

Quantum Supremacy - Michio Kaku ***

Douglas Adams in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy points out that the guide starts off frenetically, commenting on how mind-bogglingly big space is, but 'after a while it settles down a bit and it starts telling you things you actually want to know…' Quantum Supremacy is written in this style. To begin with, the reader is battered with all the amazing things quantum computers will (or at least might be able to) do, but eventually things calm down and we get onto some useful content. What you won't find here is any detail on the nature of quantum computers, how they work or on the very significant challenges faced in achieving anything that is to become mainstream. This is all treated at even higher level than a serious newspaper article would. What Michio Kaku is interested in is the potential applications, and the book takes us through a significant number of these. You will read how quantum computers have the potential to transform our understanding of biology

The Future of Geography - Tim Marshall ****

Geography is a strange subject. Parts of it - physical geography - are definitely scientific in nature. The rest - political and social geography is far more removed from anything that could be described as hard science. What Tim Marshall, an expert in foreign affairs, covers here is a strange hybrid - it's all about the political side, but because Marshall is here not considering geopolitics but astropolitics, it has a science and technology aspect. The Future of Geography ( Astropolitics in the US) is about the politics that applies in space, and space inevitably comes with plenty of STEM baggage. The majority of the book is a very effective exploration of how different space-going blocs - notably US, China and Russia, plus significant others like the EU and UK - are likely to take on the potential benefits and risks of space over the next 30 years or so. There is a relatively short consideration of the commercialisation of space (I would have liked a little more on this), but