Forget the bad pun of the title; this is a first-rate survey of the world of mathematics by a British practitioner of the art.
Yes, there is art in doing math, an aesthetic delight in the kind of creation that leads to an aha experience at what a proof reveals. Bellos (Here's Looking at Euclid: A Surprising Excursion Through the Astonishing World of Math, 2010, etc.) compares it to the punch line of a joke. He begins with chapters revealing how deep-seated are our feelings about numbers: why seven is special and one is the “yang” and masculine, while two is “yin” and feminine. He follows up with an amazing finding on the abundance of numbers beginning with one or two and the paucity of higher initial digits in any stories you read in the paper but also in populations, stock prices, etc.—a phenomenon known as Benford’s Law. The author then moves on to geometry, algebra, calculus, the laws of logic and the nature of proofs, always with an eye toward showing how an esoteric discovery so often has practical applications. The beautiful, longish S segment of a curve called the clothoid turns out to be the transition path used by trains and roads when moving from a straight to a circular path to avoid jolting passengers. Sometimes the going gets tough (e.g., fractals), and Bellos advises skipping to the beginning of the next chapter, where he always starts with elementary concepts. In this way, the author leads readers by the hand through such marvels as pi and the exponential constant e, noting how often mathematicians deplored new concepts like imaginary numbers, not to mention infinity. Indeed, part of the book’s charm lies in the sketches of notables—e.g., the modest genius of Leonhard Euler, the dysfunctional Bernoulli family and the bitter Leibniz-Newton feud over who invented calculus.
Great reading for the intellectually curious.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4009-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
13
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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