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

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

The Meteorite Hunters - Joshua Howgego *****

This is an extremely engaging read on a subject that everyone is aware of, but few of us know much detail about. Usually, if I'm honest, geology tends to be one of the least entertaining scientific subjects but here (I suppose, given that geo- refers to the Earth it ought to be astrology... but that might be a touch misleading). Here, though, there is plenty of opportunity to capture our interest. The first part of the book takes us both to see meteorites and to hear stories of meteorite hunters, whose exploits vary from erudite science trips to something more like an Indiana Jones outing. Joshua Howgego takes us back to the earliest observations and discoveries of meteorites and the initial doubt that they could have extraterrestrial sources, through to explorations of deserts and the Antarctic - both locations where it tends to be easier to find them. I, certainly, had no idea about the use of camera networks to track incoming meteors, which not only try to estimate where they wi...

Search This Blog