By Matt Parker
If you like Humble Pi, you might also like:
What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last? What if everyone only had one soulmate? What would happen if the moon went away? In pursuit of answers, Munroe runs computer simulations, pours over stacks of declassified military research memos, solves differential equations, and consults with nuclear reactor operators in masterpieces of clarity and hilarity complimented by his signature xkcd comics.
Too often math gets a bad rap, characterized as dry and difficult. On a crusade to counter this belief, Bellos has travelled around the globe and plunged into history to uncover fascinating stories of mathematical achievement. Taking us into the wilds of the Amazon, he tells the story of a tribe there who can count only to five and reports on the latest findings about the math instinct—including the revelation that ants can actually count how many steps they’ve taken. Exploring the mysteries of randomness, he explains why it is impossible for our iPods to truly randomly select songs. Throughout, the journey is enhanced with a wealth of intriguing illustrations, such as of the clever puzzles known as tangrams and the crochet creation of an American math professor who suddenly realized one day that she could knit a representation of higher dimensional space that no one had been able to visualize. Here’s Looking at Euclid is a rare gem that brings the beauty of math to life.
Riverhead Books, 2020. 314 pages. Nonfiction
Our whole world is built on math, from the code running a website to the equations enabling the design of skyscrapers and bridges. Most of the time this math works quietly behind the scenes . . . until it doesn’t. Exploring and explaining a litany of glitches, near misses, and mathematical mishaps involving the internet, big data, elections, street signs, lotteries, the Roman Empire, and an Olympic team, Matt Parker uncovers the bizarre ways math trips us up, and what this reveals about its essential place in our world. Getting it wrong has never been more fun!
You might not think that comedy and mathematics are topics that work well together, but this book pulls it off! Parker has a very dry sense of humor, one that I found delightfully entertaining even when discussing topics like standardized calendaring systems and financial algorithms. In addition to this, while largely an entertaining read, it is very technical at times! This may be a plus for any reader eager to learn obscure specifics about the functions of coding, mathematics, mechanics, and more. There were some segments that I found difficult to follow the logic of, but this book is formatted as a series of short stories and segments, so if one segment is too challenging (or perhaps simply not in the interest of the reader) it is easy to skip to the next without any impact on the reading experience.
By Randall Munroe
Boston, 2014. 303 pages. Nonfiction
By Alex Bellos
New York, 2010. 319 pages. Nonfiction
-MD
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