I'm afraid I may have to apologise for this post - I'm going to nerd out on you for the first, but probably not the last, time. You see, unfortunately, I have spent the last four years reading maths at university, and that sort of thing leaves its mark. In my case, it's an inability to pass any kind of popular maths book without experiencing a strong desire to read it. I have noticed, as a result of this penchant, firstly that very few non-scientists will read science books of any kind, and secondly that most books of popular science and maths are very accessible to, well, anyone - whether or not they are scientists by nature.
I shall, therefore, occasionally review science books as well, in the vague hope of righting this wrong, and I am going to start with Littlewood's Miscellany. This more or less does as it says on the tin. It is a short collection of mathematical oddities and items of interest. Most of these are accessible to pretty much anyone who is willing to read them, and the few that aren't are helpfully marked by the author with stars.
The reason I chose this book to start with is that Littlewood, unlike most mathematicians, is a very engaging writer. He has a strong sense of humour and is quite happy to laugh at himself and his fellow mathematicians (especially his fellow mathematicians!). This is not really a book to be read cover-to-cover (for me to be saying this is unusual to say the least. I am one of nature's cover-to-cover readers. I've even read joke books from cover to cover!), rather it should be dipped into at random moments.
Leave it somewhere in your house where you are frequently bored. For instance, if you find you are often ready to leave the house long before the rest of your family, you might keep it by the door & read as you wait. Or, if you are forced to watch a lot of sports matches in which you have little or no interest, keep in the living room and dip in and out of it as your interest in the match ebbs away and rises again.
I can recommend starting with the second and third chapters, which, consisting of errors made by the good (and indeed great!) mathematicians of the past, will serve to reassure you that mathematicians are not necessarily people of inhuman intelligence, but are as silly (and often petty) as anyone else. I can also recommend the chapter on large numbers, simply for the awe one experiences as one realises just how large large can be.
My final thoughts on the matter then (I'm fast running out of ways to express the word conclusion - I may have to cycle around the synonyms I've found thus far!), are that this is an entertaining read, worth it for chapters two and three alone, if , like me, you enjoy reading about others' errors. However, if you find the maths a bit too off-putting for you, don't worry, my next will be back to my fictional best! (oh dear, that sort of sounds as though I were making all this up. I'm not, I promise... Put it down to poor phrasing please...)
No comments:
Post a Comment