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
Noted number cruncher Sperling delivers an economist’s rejoinder to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Former director of the National Economic Council in the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the author has long taken a view of the dismal science that takes economic justice fully into account. Alongside all the metrics and estimates and reckonings of GDP, inflation, and the supply curve, he holds the great goal of economic policy to be the advancement of human dignity, a concept intangible enough to chase the econometricians away. Growth, the sacred mantra of most economic policy, “should never be considered an appropriate ultimate end goal” for it, he counsels. Though 4% is the magic number for annual growth to be considered healthy, it is healthy only if everyone is getting the benefits and not just the ultrawealthy who are making away with the spoils today. Defining dignity, admits Sperling, can be a kind of “I know it when I see it” problem, but it does not exist where people are a paycheck away from homelessness; the fact, however, that people widely share a view of indignity suggests the “intuitive universality” of its opposite. That said, the author identifies three qualifications, one of them the “ability to meaningfully participate in the economy with respect, not domination and humiliation.” Though these latter terms are also essentially unquantifiable, Sperling holds that this respect—lack of abuse, in another phrasing—can be obtained through a tight labor market and monetary and fiscal policy that pushes for full employment. In other words, where management needs to come looking for workers, workers are likely to be better treated than when the opposite holds. In still other words, writes the author, dignity is in part a function of “ ‘take this job and shove it’ power,” which is a power worth fighting for.
A declaration worth hearing out in a time of growing inequality—and indignity.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7987-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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The chief White House and Washington correspondent for ABC provides a ringside seat to a disaster-ridden Oval Office.
It is Karl to whom we owe the current popularity of a learned Latin term. Questioning chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, he followed up a perhaps inadvertently honest response on the matter of Ukrainian intervention in the electoral campaign by saying, “What you just described is a quid pro quo.” Mulvaney’s reply: “Get over it.” Karl, who has been covering Trump for decades and knows which buttons to push and which to avoid, is not inclined to get over it: He rightly points out that a reporter today “faces a president who seems to have no appreciation or understanding of the First Amendment and the role of a free press in American democracy.” Yet even against a bellicose, untruthful leader, he adds, the press “is not the opposition party.” The author, who keeps his eye on the subject and not in the mirror, writes of Trump’s ability to stage situations, as when he once called Trump out, at an event, for misrepresenting poll results and Trump waited until the camera was off before exploding, “Fucking nasty guy!”—then finished up the interview as if nothing had happened. Trump and his inner circle are also, by Karl’s account, masters of timing, matching negative news such as the revelation that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election with distractions away from Trump—in this case, by pushing hard on the WikiLeaks emails from the Democratic campaign, news of which arrived at the same time. That isn’t to say that they manage people or the nation well; one of the more damning stories in a book full of them concerns former Homeland Security head Kirstjen Nielsen, cut off at the knees even while trying to do Trump’s bidding.
No one’s mind will be changed by Karl’s book, but it’s a valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4562-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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