Visions of Numberland - Alex Bellos and Edmund Harriss **

When someone flogs a concept to death financially it is sometimes described as 'milking it for all it's worth'. This isn't something I've ever come across in popular science before, but by producing a mathematical adult colouring book on his recurring (see what I did then?) 'numberland' theme, Alex Bellos has managed it.

I'll be honest, I'm not a fan of adult colouring books. It adds a whole new texture to 'dumbing down' that they are considered (and priced as) books at all. And I'm afraid this has not made me a convert.

I don't deny that it's possible for maths to be used as a brilliant starting point for art. No one who appreciates mathematics can fail to be impressed by Escher's work, for example. And to give Bellos his due, we do get a handful of lines of description for each mathematical structure that we are offered to colour in. Even so, and despite being provided with 60 patterns to colour (and '10 more that YOU create!' - oh, still my beating heart), it does seem a bit of a rip off to price this like a book that actually took someone time to write - it costs nearly £10.

Can I find something good to say? The shapes by mathematical artist Edmund Harriss are delightfully constructed, especially when they move away from the simply geometric with something like the Hopf vibration. And just occasionally Bellos does give us a bit more detail, for example in the Thue-Morse sequence where we get almost half a page of text. But there could have been so much more.

As you might have gathered, this very much isn't for me.

Paperback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here. We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Search This Blog