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 Infinite Alphabet - Cesar Hidalgo ****

Although taking a very new approach, this book by a physicist working in economics made me nostalgic for the business books of the 1980s. More on why in a moment, but Cesar Hidalgo sets out to explain how it is knowledge - how it is developed, how it is managed and forgotten - that makes the difference between success and failure. When I worked for a corporate in the 1980s I was very taken with Tom Peters' business books such of In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman), which described what made it possible for some companies to thrive and become huge while others failed. (It's interesting to look back to see a balance amongst the companies Peters thought were excellent, with successes such as Walmart and Intel, and failures such as Wang and Kodak.) In a similar way, Hidalgo uses case studies of successes and failures for both businesses and countries in making effective use of knowledge to drive economic success. When I read a Tom Peters book I was inspired and fired up...

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life. To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...

The War on Science - Lawrence Krauss (Ed.) ****

At first glance this might appear to be yet another book on how to deal with climate change deniers and the like, such as How to Talk to a Science Denier. It is, however, a much more significant book because it addresses the way that universities, government and pressure groups have attempted to undermine the scientific process. Conceptually I would give it five stars, but it's quite heavy going because it's a collection of around 18 essays by different academics, with many going over the same ground, so there is a lot of repetition. Even so, it's an important book. There are a few well-known names here - editor Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker - but also a range of scientists (with a few philosophers) explaining how science is being damaged in academia by unscientific ideas. Many of the issues apply to other disciplines as well, but this is specifically about the impact on science, and particularly important there because of the damage it has been doing...

Search This Blog