This book is a collection of essays about math. They are shorter than many of the other essays I’ve read and slightly more interesting though less deterministic [often the reader is left with things to think about rather than drawn to one conclusion]. This book was originally published in Portugal and reprinted in the US. I’m not sure what happened between there and here, but all the graphics in the book are jaggedy and weird, as if they were blown up from really small images. Not a huge deal, but fiarly distracting [and in some cases problematic] in an otherwise really nice looking book.

Gene Yang at a pivotal point in his life/career decides to write a book about a basketball story, despite not ever liking sports very much. He works as a math teacher and is looking for a story. And he finds one, and also kind of makes one. As a fellow non-basketball-enthusiast, I really enjoyed getting the story told to me in this way. A masterful book.

For whatever reason I just really did not like this book. The illustration is great but the plot was sort of meted out by multiple voices simultaneously, spent way too long on very specific and arcane bits of math, and overall didn’t give us a really good feeling about Turing relative to what I’ve already read about him. Was expecting better.

Really enjoyed this short poignant story about a lower class woman who takes care of an older man with a serious memory problem--he can only remember the last 80 minutes of his life, and things that happened before 1975. The older man is also, was also, a mathematics professor and his mind still engages with math problems even as he has to keep slips of paper attached to himself to remember who his housekeeper is. Lots of levels to this book including baseball and, of course, math.

I love smart and interesting books about math and this is one of the best ones. Jordan talks about a lot of interesting issues in the math community and does so with a lot more humor then I’m used to in books like this. He’s got a great way of explaining things and not only makes you learn things about math but you get excited to know more.

I started this book years ago and then left it out in the rain and then it was in the freezer for a year or so. It’s SO GREAT. If you like math puzzles but can get bogged down with too much detail or too many arcane diagrams, this is for you. Lots of short anecdotes illustrating a math puzzle or a conundrum. Just enough backstory to make it interesting--and for you to look up if it turns out it’s your thing--and then on the next thing. Entertaining cartoons and the always readable Gardner explaining it all. Worth tracking down, a really great book.

Continuing in the “people with weird head issues” theme, this is a book about Jason Padgett who received a terrible beating and became a different person. Specifically, a different person who was really good at math and drawing mathematical concepts. i had a hard time with this book only because I’ve known people with mental illnesses (not brought on by head trauma) that mirrored a lot of the claims that Padgett is making. I can see why he is considered a savant and it really does seem true that some of his claims about his increased math skills are true. it also seems that some of them are ... possibly delusional and I wasn’t relieved of this skepticism by reading the book. I’m happy that Padgett’s life has turned around a lot after the first horrible years as a virtual hermit after his injury. At the same time it was difficult to read about his other untreated issues such as his OCD and chronic pain troubles. A good book but difficult to read.

I think I got off of the “popular math” books with this one.Nothing wrong with it, in fact I sort of liked it, but I just read a chunk of it and then never picked it up again and eventually it had to go back to the library.

I really enjoyed this historical walk through the history of people being in to numbers. Since I’ve been a kid, math was just a thing you were supposed to know and it was taken for granted that in fact you needed to know math in order to be a fully fledged person. It would come up in everything and it was essential in order to have a job, run a household or understand things. This was not always the case. Cohen goes back through Colonial times to talk about why we started counting things and what the weird messy in-between times were like when some people were numerically literate and some were not.

Of particular interest to me were the attempts at various censuses--ostensibly taken for taxation purposes but actually used for things such as making a case for slavery, of all things. The long sad case of the terrible mess that was the 1840’s census is a much better story than you would really think it should be. All the chapters are like that, starting with some sort of dry topic like “When did math start to be taught in schools?” you wind up with a bunch of fun anecdotes and definitive research that not only answers the questions but makes them even more fascinating in hindsight. A really enjoyable book.

I read these sorts of hobby math books for fun. This was one of my favorite so far. Unlike other books about math that seem to get hung up on stuff like “Let’s talk about VOTING for 50 pages ...” this one is broken down into short chapters about people and things that are slightly more current and slightly more interesting. I found myself going to Wikipedia or other sources to read more about some of the topics that Bellos only touched on. I rarely found my eyes glazing over when his discussion became too abstruse and I think I really understand a few things that I wasn’t clear on before [what slide rules were for, the different sorts of infinities and the history of lottery and gambling gaming situations]. I feel like Bellos' enthusiasm for the subject is infectious and he was able to get complicated subjects across well without seeming too cutesy or jokey. He also went and did first person interviews with some of the famous mathematicians that he mentions and these provide a really humanizing look at some fairly esoteric subjects. If you can read one popular math treatise this year, make it this one.

I generally eat up these “teach normal people math” books and this one is even a cut above the rest. While Best is aware that people lie with statistics, he is specifically interested in how statistics come to us, from whom, and to what end. He explores the relationship of statistics to activism -- how statistics are often produced by activists who want to make a particular point, refuted by members of the status quo and often misrepresented by the press -- and how they often take on lives of their own. He uses several very strightforward examples, covering the whole range of political beliefs, so no one comes away disbelieving them due to their own biases, and explains how the lifespan of a statistic works. It’s great reading, and makes you feel smarter and more assured -- not angrier and more annoyed -- when you are done reading it.

Another fun poppy book about math. Enjoyed it though my eyes started to glaze over towards the end of it when he devotes a lot of time to social choice theory and voting behavior. While I understood the examples, I had a hard time reading about voting options in any sort of narrative way. Otherwise this collection is surprisingly chatty and occasionally amusing for a collection of short essays about various math topics. I learned that 153 may be my favorite number and I learned about friendly and amicable numbers and a lot of other stuff that I may not use in my real life. I’ve read a lot of these sorts of books and this is one of my favorites.

This book helps you understand calculus. Rather it probably helps you understand why you don’t already know calculus. Ouellette has an approachable likeable tone and uses a lot of interesting contemporary examples to help you understand things like derivatives and integrals and why you might care to even know this stuff. She delves into a lot of interesting math history and really works hard to make examples that are real-world and relevant, using such locations as Disneyland, a surfing beach in Hawaii and Las Vegas.

That said, I still don’t know calculus and I think it’s not her fault. The book, while upbeat and “you can do it” in tone is also sort of a popular approach to the work and so is sometimes jokey when maybe it should be more explanatory. Ouellette’s husband is a physicist and she admits herself that she was not the most eager of math students herself. So there’s a camraderie aspect that didn’t resonate with me [probably because I am a grouch] and every time they went to a new fancy location to illustrate some principle or another, I’d jadedly think “Oh I guess that vacation is a tax writeoff then.” Most people who are not grouches will enjoy this book.

This is an odd story which is told like some sort of hollywood movie, yet it involves real people committing some very real crimes. The author has a connection with one of the people involved in part of the story and the rest of the story is told through this possibly disgruntled person’s eyes. It’s all about a ring of smart MIT students who used a system to play blackjack with teams and break the bank, or at least always win, at Vegas casinos. The whole time they were on this team, they were “run” by some shady underworld figures that no one really knew very well. Towards the end they start getting figured out and things get desperate, some people decide to stick it out in the risker business of evading tighter and tighter scrutiny and some got out. This book describes it all in detail. The system, the steps they took to avoid getting caught, the steps the casinos took to shut them down. It’s an interesting wacky caper story with the “criminal masterminds” just being some average suburban kids with a good head for math. Good reading, drops off a bit towards the end and definitely an early book by an author whose better writing is probably ahead of him.

More of the same. The author, who is good with math, looks at people who use statistics who are not so good at amth. Along the way he explains why some things that we thought were true about the world are not true and why some things we thought were not true, are. If you liked the first book, this one is almost as good though seems a little scanter on interesting original topics and instead looks at the math behind some standard stats we’ve heard but never really known the backstory on.

This book had a flashy cover and was in the sci fi section so I picked it up. It’s just barely sci-fi. Actually, I read in Library Journal that only losers call science fiction sci fi any more so I guess I’ll have to say sf. In any case, it’s mostly a love story, the way The Goldbug Variations was a love story but also sort of about math and science and music.

Not that this is bad, but the premise of the science in the book -- of a transhuman-ish future where the sex and gender lines blur dramatically -- was appealing and didn’t really come to the forefront until one of those long awkward “here is what the science is all about” conversations in the last pages of the book. Of course, the entire story is an allegory for this larger scientific discovery. A group of friends in college explores different sorts of relationships and lifestyles while one smart but tortured soul becomes a bit of a woman-hating feminist pundit. I was hoping for more science and less parable, but the story alone supported the book, and the writing and relationships were both sincere-seeming enough to make it worth while.

This was an otherwise inteersting book onthe nature of probabilities that was flawed in my opinion by too much math and not enough chatty anecdotes. The author is clearly a smart man who knows his stuff. Yet, a lot of times he would start explaining a phenomenon like the liklihood of finding two people in a room with the same birthday [whcih is over 50% if you have 23 or more people in the room, if I recall correctly] and then veer off into a complicated equation as an “answer” to is, assuming his readers are as facile with math as he is. This wasn’t a huge problem, but sometimes I’d really want to learn more about how a probability problem worked and find that in order to do that, I had to really start crunching some numbers. I’m even good at math but this was too much math for me in an otherwise sort of popular book. The appendix by Brad Johnson may easily be the most interesting part of the book in that it deals with gambling directly and has many more real-world exaples to draw from and much less math.

Sometimes I just troll the “new” shelves at the library to see what’s been coming in. This book looked like one of those perky little financial self help books so I took it home. When I realized the guy wa a columnist for the Times, I thought “Oh no, more hype about mutual funds and IRAs being the only way to prepare for retirement...” but was pleasantly surprised to see a lot of good advice with a range of options presented depending on what sort of life you want in your retirement. Brock is all about the sane saving and spending of money and refutes the standard investment advisor advice about needing 70-80% of your current income to be able to make it in retirement. He says if you want to keep woring, that’s cool, but he outlines a few ways you can save more money earlier -- driving an older car, moving to a place with a lower tax burden, selling a large house you no longer need -- and then retire earlier. His tone is chatty but his math is solid and his advice isn’t scary it’s useful. I’m not anywhere near looking to retire but even in my situation I learned some tricks about where to put my money now that will benefit me in the future.

This book has been called one of the last great war memoirs. It is a first hand account of Mark’s time working for the British Intelligence code bureau as a code cracker. This was back in the days when they still employed teams of young women to try to crack codes by brute force methods and Marks would often explain how they would only get an agent’s missent code cracked after 2,000 or 3,000 tries. The advent of computers into the world of math and science has rendered most of the practices in this book quaintly obsolete which is one of the reasons it makes such good reading. Another reason is that Marks’s father is the Marks who owned 84 Charing Cross Road, a famous British bookstore and peppers his text with anecdotes about that well-loved landmark.

As in many war memoirs, Marks is the hero of all of his stories and paints himself to be quite the character. Each chapter shows him going up against the military higher-ups who he is sure will fire him but he always remains employed and victorious. He is the codemaster responsible for the troops using silk code sheets [easily hidden, easily destroyed] to encode their agents' messages towards the end of the war. If I had one objection to this bok, it would be that looking at WWII -- an event of unspeakable horror for many members of my family as well as the families of others -- through the eyes of a desk-jockey, can be a bit off-putting. You see people making understandable mistakes, but ones that endanged the lives of others who are on the front lines and you wince over and over again.