I really enjoyed Jordan Ellenberg’s earlier book How Not to be Wrong , so looked forward to Shape with some anticipation. In principle what we have here is a book about geometry - but not seen from the direction of the (dare I say it) rather boring, Euclid-based geometry textbooks some of us suffered at school. Instead Ellenberg sets out to show how geometry underlies pretty much everything. Along the way, we are given some nice turns of phrase. I enjoyed, for example, Ellenberg’s remark on the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, where Ellenberg remarks Hobbes was ‘a man whose confidence in his own mental powers is not fully captured by the prefix “over”’. Whether or not what we read about here is really all geometry is a matter of labelling (as is the ‘number of holes in a straw’ question that Ellenberg entertainingly covers). Arguably, for example, there is some material that is probability that can be looked at in a geometric fashion, rather than geometry that produces probabilistic result
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