Popular mathematics can be hard to make engaging. Though some topics (such as infinity or zero) can be made interesting in isolation, usually it's best if it can be tied to something more concrete, and what Paulina Rowińska does here is to bring us the story of maps and the the maths behind them. Although Rowińska starts with Mercator and other early projections, it's not really a history of mapping - for example, there is no mention of Roger Bacon's description of using coordinates for mapping - instead the focus is the twin mathematical bases of mapping, geometry and trigonometry before moving onto other maths connections from fractals and operational research to Bayes' theorem. We start with the nature of a curved world and the compromises that need to be made to translate a 3D surface onto a sheet of paper - compromises that are rarely stated and make a huge difference to the look of the map. This is mostly very engaging, except when it spends too long on geometry a...