Skip to main content

The Mathematics Lover's Companion - Edward Scheinerman ****

The worrying thing about this title is that I'm not sure I am a maths lover. I find some parts of mathematics interesting - infinity and probability, for example - but a lot of it is just a means to an end for me. The good news is that, even if you are like me, there's a lot to like here, though you may find yourself skipping through some parts.

 Edward Scheinerman takes us through 23 mathematical areas, so should you find a particular one doesn't work for you, it's easy enough to move onto another that does. Sometimes it wasn't the obvious ones that intrigued - where I found the section on infinity, for example, a little underwhelming, I really enjoyed the section on factorials. The book opens with prime numbers, which while not the most exciting of its contents, gives the reader a solid introduction to the level of mathematical thought they will be dealing with. It's enough to get the brain working - this isn't a pure fun read and you have to think - but not so challenging that you feel obliged to give up.

 Along the way, Scheinerman is enthusiastic and encouraging with a light, informative style. Each page has side bars (meaning there's a lot of white space), which contain occasional comments and asides. I found these rather irritating for two reasons. In part because it really breaks up the reading process - if it's worth saying, say it in the main text - and partly because (in good Fermat fashion) there's not a lot of room so, for example, when we are told the origin of the RSA algorithm in the side bar, there's space to say it's named after Rivest, Shamir and Adelman but not to say that Cocks came up with it before them.

 Occasionally, as often seems the case with mathematicians, the author seemed to be in a slightly different world. He says that the angle trisection problem is more famous that squaring the circle - which seems very unlikely - and though he notes that pi day is usually considered to be 14 March (when written as 3/14) he doesn't point out it makes much more sense in the non-US world for it to be the 22 July (22/7).

 A typical section for me was the one the constant e (like pi, a number that crops up in nature and is valuable in a number of mathematical applications). There were parts of the section that I found really interesting: I'd never really seen the point of e before, the compound interest example was an eye-opener and there's the beautiful eiÏ€= -1. The two other examples, though, I did have to skip as they were a little dull. 

 My favourite part was at the end - the sections on uncertainty, including non-transitive dice (where you can have a series of dice, each of which can beat one of the others) and equivalent poker hands, Bayesian statistics, how to have a fair election and a fascinating game (Newcomb's paradox) - where it seems that you should choose what's not best for you to come out best - were all great. It would have been even better if the election section had used terms like 'first past the post' and 'single transferable vote' to make a clearer parallel with real election systems - and the Newcomb's paradox section should have made more of the difficulty of predicting an individual's choice - but these are small concerns.

 So will anyone love all of it? Probably not. If you truly do love maths, you'll know a lot of this already. If you aren't sure about your relationship with the field, the book won't all work for you - but that bits that do should be enough to show that mathematics can make an entertaining and stimulating companion.

 Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more