Blog, Jvstin Style

Book Review 2007 #51: The Math Book

A book from 1975 I have a long history with.

The year was that distant land known as 1982. I was in sixth grade, already starting a love of science and science fiction.

My mother gave me a book from a source I never really established. A plain brown book with red lettering and a line drawing of the square root of two with a ladder attached to it. "The Math Book" it read, by Nancy Myers.

I am not sure that my mother really knew what she had given me.

I am not as strong in mathematics as some of my friends, but I do all right. And so, a sixth grader started reading this book. It turns out the Math Book was a book targeted at liberal arts students in college without much mathematical background. Mathematics without much, if any, equations, at the height of "New Math."

I devoured the book for years. The end of each chapter had references to other books which, over the next few years, I would find and read too: Gamow's One, Two, Three...Infinity and Kasner's Mathematics and the Imagination. I also got into Escher thanks to this book because of its use of Escher prints.

Finally, the book fell apart, and I retired it, and didn't think about the book for years. I mostly forgot the name of the author, too...

Cue 2006. On a whim, I got to thinking about the book again, and how I had liked it so much. I also was curious as to its contents, years later. I recalled only the book's name and its author and I set out to search for it.

If you type in "the math book" into amazon, or even google, you will find a lot of hits. I narrowed things down over a few weeks, trying various publishing years and the like. Finally I found, from an out of print seller on Amazon, a 1975 book called "The Math Book" by Nancy Myers published in 1975. That sounded right. However, without a picture, I wasn't sure if it was. On a whim, I decided to buy it.

When the book arrived and I opened the envelope, I was delighted to see the old brown book.

And now I can tell you the contents. It really is a textbook intended for liberal arts students without prior heavy background in math.It covers a variety of topics, with questions at the end, and interspersing the text with page-sized sidebars on mathematical figures and miscellany. These digressions range from discussing Pythagoras to the Arceibo Radio Telescope.

Each chapter starts with a cute line drawing. For example, chapter two, which is called "counting beyond the counting numbers" has two backpacked travelers on a road in the sky, looking nervously at the signpost ahead of them. The signpost reads "Aleph null miles to..."

Although the last chapter is outdated with its digressions into astronomy, which is far out of date, the rest of the book stands well.

The book's contents:

Chapter one: From Counting to Complex Numbers

--Ancient number systems, rational and irrational numbers, complex numbers

Chapter two: Counting Beyond the Complex Numbers

--Sets, infinity, transfinite numbers

Chapter three: Calculating with Statements

--Logic, two and multivalued

Chapter Four: Finite Arithmetics

--Modulo(clock) arithmetics, rings and fields

Chapter Five: Arithmetics Without Numbers

--Groups, rotations, tessellations

Chapter Six: Calculated Chances

--Probability

Chapter Seven: Finite Geometries

--Graphs and Networks

Chapter Eight: Geometries with a Twist

--Non Euclidean Geometries

Posted by Jvstin at November 3, 2007 8:57 AM