A classic curate's egg of a book. Some aspects of it are brilliant, but there is enough that isn't to make it frustrating. Wisely, Oliver Johnson decided to do a book on very practical aspects of maths - applications that are a wonderful counter to the old moan at school of 'but what use is it to me?' This is great, but two aspects are less positive. One is that this would be a sensible argument if we taught school students this stuff. Just as I think we should teach interesting physics, this is genuinely interesting maths that doesn't necessarily involve more work to learn the basics. But we don't. The second issue is that Johnson decided to do maths without formulae and equations. This is a common enough practice in popular science, where you can often get away without the mathematics, but in popular maths it is a real stumbling block. When, for example, Johnson is telling us about Bayesian methods - really useful stuff - rather than presenting us a with a ver...