Skip to main content

Wonders Beyond Numbers - Johnny Ball ****

For many people, Johnny Ball's TV programmes were the first indication that mathematics does not have to be frightening or hard work, but could actually be fun. In the introduction to Wonders Beyond Numbers, Ball mentions being particularly inspired by Martin Gardner's books of mathematical puzzles and diversions - as were so many - and Ball's TV programmes had a similar inspirational effect, particularly for younger viewers.

In this chunky (480 page) book, Ball takes on 'a brief history of all things mathematical.' In doing so, he gives us a broad sweep, making things more interesting than would be possible if concentrating purely on the work of mathematicians. So, for example, in starting with the Ancient Greeks, he brings in philosophers who had little direct input to maths, but who helped produce the thought processes that would inspire the big numerical names. Towards the end of the book, there are a good number of physicists brought in who, again, didn't contribute much to mathematics (it's hard to think of less mathematical physicist, for example, than Faraday), but who were contributing to a discipline where maths has become absolutely central.

Wisely, Ball drives the narrative from the people, rather than taking us through a whole list of mathematical disciplines and components. It's not that the branches of mathematics aren't there. We get plenty of geometry, for example, and algebra, number theory, calculus... the works, all the way up to topology and other trendy topics. But it never feels like we're reading a watered-down textbook. The relationship between human beings and mathematics always prevails.

It's often the case with books of this kind that the focus is entirely on Europe, but Ball gives us a satisfying couple of chapters that take in China, India, Central America and the Arabic-speaking world. If anything, this was the best part of the book for me, as it covered material that is less frequently seen and is a real eye-opener.

I also particularly liked the section at the back labelled 'Wow Factor Mathematical Index' which is really more of an appendix, diving into the actual mathematical bits in more detail for those who feel up to it. Here we discover everything from the way that the Ancient Egyptians did division, through a calculation to estimate the length of Archimedes' 'lever to move the Earth', to Al-Khwarizmi's algebra. It was sensible to separate this material off, as it's significantly more detailed than is the rest of the book, but satisfying to have it if required.

Wonders Beyond Numbers delivers a whole lot of maths, mathematical history and biography - if I've a criticism it fits too much in, which means that many of the individual biographical sections are more summary than I would have liked. The result is a book that isn't ideal to sit and read end to end. I found it better to dip into on a regular basis - great for commuting or bedtime reads. The speed of coverage meant also that some of the history was a little over-simplified. For example, we are told that the idea the Earth was cylindrical 'remained unchanged for some 700 years'. Yet many philosophers in that period from Aristotle to Eratosthenes (who assumed a spherical Earth in his calculation of its size) considered it a sphere.

If maths has always seemed little more than arithmetic, or you can't see the point of algebra, or it all seems a set of rules handed down from on high at school, without any context of where these ideas came from, this is great book to start making sense of this most remarkable of disciplines.

Hardback:  

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


Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

  1. Admittedly, when it comes to Kindle you have little choice, but why do you link to Amazon for hard copies, rather than to the publishers, or any of the other independent sources? As for why you should choose to do so, see https://platofootnote.wordpress.com/2018/02/26/against-the-four-amazon-apple-facebook-and-google/

    Apart from this, let me express my appreciation for this ongoing series

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for your appreciation. It's quite simple - the only funding this site gets is from Amazon affiliate links. There is no real alternative at the moment.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

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 â€˜Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...