Summer Maths Reading Round-Up

Well summer is nearly over so it will be back to work soon (booo). I'm supposed to have been reading loads of children's books this summer but actually I've read a few maths books instead. I thought I'd round them up, in case anyone fancied expanding their horizon-brackets.

First off, textbooks. "A Concise Course in A Level Statistics" by Crawshaw and Chambers (4th ed). I bought this to back up my Stats module but it is far too detailed for AS students like me. I get the impression it isn't quite updated for the 2004 syllabus but it is certainly very detailed, full of useful exercises and depth. I don't think I'd advise it for AS Level but it might be handy if you were doing S2 as well.

I have a battered copy of the legendary Bostock and Chandler too, which you can get hold of very cheaply from Amazon or your local friendly maths teacher (there are loads of them around). This is very hard (later editions may be more idiot-friendly) and it progresses at light speed. Again, good for back up and for extra exercises.

And so to Popular Maths books. I get the impression that this is an infant genre, for the authors haven't really got the hang of the "popular" aspect. Popular science bedazzles its readers with accounts of billions of years of DNA multiplication, or the whizzing of quarks: the maths equivalents tend to err on the side of really hard equations and bizarre concepts that the reader is advised to just shut up and listen to and not worry about. This is probably due to the fact, which mathematicians are reluctant to admit, that maths is abstract and dry. This is why it is great, but they are desperate to prove that it is just as mind boggling as the end of the universe. Which, to be fair, it's not. That doesn't mean it's not amazing in its own right, just that it's not staggeringly mind-blowing. To fill the gaps, popular maths authors sometimes try and jazz things up with literary quotes, bullshit about poetry, or insights into the private lives of mathematicians.

Can I make a suggestion, guys? If I'm reading about maths, leave out the bloody poetry. I have tons of poetry books on my shelves and I don't expect to read garbage about cubic equations in books about TS Eliot so encountering the reverse is a pain in the arse. It really is.

Why not just focus on the austere beauty of maths? The elegance, the truthfulness, the logic?

A lot of this is an attack on Barry Mazur's book "Imagining Numbers", which is actually very well written. It just has pages of irrelevant speculation and sub-undergraduate waffle about the nature of poetry. I see what he is trying to do here but this is a guy who is one of the world's greatest mathematicians: there must be enough wonder in what he knows about maths without needing to prove that he's actually a sensitive artistic soul.

Also this book did my head in going on about imaginary numbers. I think you probably need to be brighter than me to get it, to be honest.

Having said that, the classic "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and Newman, of which I recently bought a dirt-cheap old puffin edition, explains i with much more economy and sense. This book is hard in places too, but is written with precisely the dry wit and occasional sarcastic humour (satirical even) that just needs to be sprinkled, rather than poured over this subject to make it generally entertaining. It's a great book. It rewards attention and promotes wonder, backing off at precisely the moment it knows it will lose its audience if it carries on. Genius.

"Mathematics Minus Fear" By Laurence Potter is a relaxingly easy read, aimed squarely at ordinary people cheesed off with arithmetic and probability: in short, school maths. There is even a proof of why you divide fractions by turning one of them upside down and multiplying. Frankly I can see why our teachers didn't try to explain that in primary school. This is a really classy book actually, with a wide target audience and some other stuff that is relevant and funny. Not deep enough to be a classic probably but useful and entertaining.

"E=mc2" by David Bodanis purports to be a biography of the equation but is, understandably, more about physics than maths. There are generous dollops of history too. Not bad actually and probably the first 60 or so pages are a close reading of the different items in the equation, a good explanation of the maths involved.

"one to Nine: the Inner Life of Numbers" by Andrew Hodges is a right royal pain in the arse and I would avoid it. When the hell will non-fiction writers get hold of this basic fact: WE DO NOT GIVE A TOSS ABOUT YOUR POLITICS, SO LEAVE THEM THE HELL OUT OF YOUR BOOKS. This book is "Maths the Guardian Way" and is cynical in its right-baiting irrelvances. With Labour 20 points behind in the polls it is breathtaking arrogance that leads some authors still to assume all readers are socialists.

Finally one I am still in the middle of: the memoirs of GH Hardy. Beautifully written, sensitive, thoughtful, mathematical, challenging. Lovely.


Disclaimer: My, erm "study" is a bit of a mess and so these book titles have been recovered from memory. If any are wrong i'll update later.