Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries - Satyan Linus Devadoss & Matthew Harvey **

The authors of Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries don't seem to quite know who it was written for. The title and the general theming around Arthurian legend pitches it at an audience of children, maybe even young teenagers. However, the content is anything but aimed at that audience.

The book is a collection of unsolved maths problems very loosely fitted to the idea of it being a collection of questions asked of the great wizard Merlin. From such a description, or a flick through the pages, you might think that this is some kind of puzzle book for you to solve, but this isn't the case. Rather, it's a collection of relatively mundane (if esoteric) questions which despite the efforts of hundreds of years of professional mathematics we still haven't solved. With sixteen mysteries in all there is a wide selection of different kinds of problems.

For example the first question is: 'Can you cover a 201x201 meter square using six 100x100 meter squares (without cutting anything up)?' The answer to this and all of the other 'mysteries' the book poses is, 'We don't know.' It might be possible but nobody has managed to figure out a mathematical proof for it. Knowing that this is the case from the start as the book rather take the fun out of reading a new mystery.

In reading this book, it feels like it has no real audience.The Arthurian dressing feels completely perfunctory as anyone that it appeals to would almost certainly have no interest in the underlying mathematics. Additionally if you are somebody to whom such mathematical problems are of great interest the information is generally sparse and it's buried under what is essentially an annoying and unnecessary framing device.

It is worth noting that the images which make up much of the book are well designed and are used effectively to communicate what can be relatively complex puzzles to get your head around.

Overall the book looks great but feels designed for a much younger audience than its content. Whilst it offers simple to understand explanations of a number of well known unsolved mathematics problems, those looking for that kind of thing would likely do much better elsewhere.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by James Lees

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 Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms. On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

Search This Blog