Any book on the crossover between art and science walks a risky tightrope - it's very easy to plunge into pretentiousness. Perhaps the main problem is that such books always seem to be driven by the art side, reflecting that perhaps Snow's two cultures concept, where the arts and humanities look down on the sciences, is yet to be resolved. This feeling was not helped by the structure of the book - any title that can get to page 43 before it starts creates a sense of foreboding in the reader who wants to get down to the nitty gritty. Nonetheless, I've always hoped I would discover an arts/science crossover title that worked - like most people with a scientific background I'm enthusiastic about much of the arts and really want to get a book that fulfils this mix. The book is framed in terms of using the crossover for finding creative solutions to complex problems - a topic I've lectured on - which was particularly encouraging. Julio Mario Ottino has some powerful poin...

To do this review fairly, I ought to point out that I'm not a great fan of books where the images dominate the text - a more visually-oriented reader may appreciate the book more than me. However, there is enough text here by Philip Ball to lift what could otherwise be little more than a coffee table book. The text I'd definitely give four stars, but in the end, the dominance of the imagery by Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang pulled it down to three stars for me, because I did still find, for example, the number of pages of pictures of bubbles or crystals (for example), started to get a bit samey. From the opener on bubbles we go on to the inevitable chapter on crystals - surely chemistry's visual superstar. I was disappointed not to see Roger Hiorn's 2008 work Seizure featured, when the artist covered a bedsit with copper sulfate crystals. I think this reflects a weakness in the visual approach, which gives us the chemical imagery in isolation from the real world - a crystal...

In this book, Sam Illingworth is on a mission - to 'present an aspirational account of how the two disciplines [of science and poetry] can work together.' He does this by presenting shortish biographies of six scientists (one of whom isn't) who wrote poetry, showing how the two aspects of their life were intertwined. I confess my immediate reaction to this was a Spock-style raised eyebrow: I'm not a great fan of poetry, and it seemed suspiciously like the kind of arty-sciency crossover that wouldn't help either side of the C. P. Snowian divide. However, I was genuinely prepared to be persuaded otherwise, and entered into the six biographies (Davy, Lovelace, Maxwell, Ross, Holub and Elson) with an open mind. I don't know if it's intentional, but the mix of relatively well-known and distinctly obscure names was part of the attraction. Humphry Davy is a familiar enough individual, but his biographical details tend to come in as a side dish to the greate...

There something of a literary version of a cabinet of curiosities about The Atlas of Poetic Zoology - it features 36 species, selected because they were outstanding to the author for a whole range of reasons, though many seem to have been chosen because they're strange-looking. Each animal gets two or three pages of text and a full page illustration, which unfortunately is painted rather than photographed, so it can be difficult to be sure how accurate the representation is - though it does make some of the illustrations rather beautiful as items in their own right. I found it entertaining to flick through, but isn't a book I can recommend to sit down and read end to end. In large part this is down to the text. Because it's a translation, I don't know if the wording, which feels a bit like a year 9 school essay, reflects the original or the way it has been rendered into English, but the result feels a distinctly immature piece of writing. Here's the openin...

Having recently been somewhat underwhelmed by a science/art crossover book , I was expecting to be equally unimpressed by  The Seduction of Curves , which promises to cover 'the lines of beauty that connect mathematics, art and the nude' - but the result is, in truth, stunning (in a good way). Using both examples from art and impressive original photography by Helena Weightman, Allan McRobie introduces us to the significant shapes that form the 'alphabet' of catastrophe theory. This sounds like something dealing with sudden and drastic failures of systems - and certainly it can be involved in them. But at its heart, it's about mathematical functions where a small change in a parameter makes a sudden and distinctive shift in the output - from example when a curve suddenly takes a totally different direction (as it often does on the contours of the human body). What makes this very different from the other title I mentioned is that this is not just a coffee...

How you respond to this book will probably depend a) on how you feel about coffee table books and b) what your response is to those sections in some newspapers (and New Scientist ) which are striking photographs with a relatively small amount of text. What Colin Salter has done here is bring together microphotographs of a large range of bacteria and viruses, along with assorted medicines, the latter particularly in crystal form. The results can be striking, particularly when false colours are used to bring out details, or in the stunning rainbow optical effects when light is passed through some crystals. I had hoped I would get enough out of the book to enjoy looking through the images in detail, but on the whole, there was a tendency very quickly to start flipping through thinking 'Yes, that's nice,' or 'That's impressive,'... without taking a lot in. In a way it's more like a trip round an art gallery exhibiting microphotographs than reading a boo...

I have to start by saying that I have never really understood the point of coffee table books. There is no way anyone is going to comfortably read Mathematics + Art as it's around 25 cm by 32 cm, and weighs in at a wrist-crunching 3 kg, heavier than many laptops. (The price is fairly wallet-crunching too.) Although it is heavily and beautifully illustrated, though, this is much more than just a picture book of images with a mathematical association. It is a genuinely interesting text, running across over 500 pages, which I found I liked far more than I wanted to. While there is, as is often the case with this kind of attempt to link science and the arts, sometimes a rather tenuous link to the mathematics, it is still fascinating to discover how the influence of maths on culture at large has had an impact on the arts. Sometimes this is in a quite explicit form, where an image, say, is mathematically derived or features a mathematician at work, while on other occasions it...

On the whole, art/science collaborations make me feel faintly queasy. From the science side there seems to be a puppy-like desperation to be loved and normal. ‘Look, I’m not really a nerd,’ they seem to say, ‘I don’t always speak incomprehensibly in technical jargon. I can do art.’ Meanwhile, the art side seems to have far too much in common with those pedlars of woo who invest their snake oil with (what they think is) scientific gravitas by using terms from quantum physics to dress up their baloney. So, if I’m honest, I came to this near coffee-table book sized collaboration between a mathematician and an artist with all the enthusiasm of someone on a trip to the dentist. As it happens, my assessment was a little harsh, because the art isn’t allowed to dominate, as is usually the case. Here what we’ve got is a series of short essays on principles of mathematics, each accompanied by a handsome, if fairly basic full page colour art work. So in a way it’s less like one of the dr...