Numbers (Ten Things You Should Know)

Numbers (Ten Things You Should Know) - Colin Stuart ****

Short, smart-looking hardback books (ideally with the number of topics in the title) continue to go down well in popular science and maths fields, and Colin Stuart's new title on some of the more fun and mind-bending aspects of numbers is one of the better examples of the format. We get ten compact, standalone chapters on the likes of counting, zero, prime numbers, cake cutting and infinity - and each works well as a tasty little mental snack.

If you've read any popular maths titles, some of what's covered here may already be familiar, but Stuart's excellent storytelling gives us a new twist on many of them, and even when they have been frequently encountered before (for example, the Monty Hall problem or there being more than one 'size' of infinity), the approach is fresh enough to still be enjoyable.

Although the title makes this about numbers - and certainly they form a significant part of the book - they are by no means everything. Leaving aside infinity not being a number (as Stuart admits), we get things like circles having an infinite set of sides, non-Euclidean geometry and graph theory. All this with hardly anything that most readers will recognise as being maths. I wish that the kind of content that Stuart presents here made up more of the school mathematics syllabus - we'd have a lot more people interested in the subject.

If I'm going to be picky there were a couple of times, notably when dealing with infinity-related topics, where the necessary simplification for a book like this meant that's what said isn't strictly accurate (for example describing the infinity of the continuum as aleph 1), but nothing that really matters to anyone other than a pedant.

Overall, a fun little book for anyone from an adult who thought maths was boring to a teenager who has shown an interest in the topic.

Hardback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

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