“Here’s looking at Euclid” by Alex Bellos is a book about mathematics. It is very general and gets into multiple, almost unrelated, facets of math. This book is aimed at math nerds and non math oriented people alike. Although Bellos does get into some fairly complex topics, he gives detailed explanations of all the concepts that he is covering, making the book quite readable. The driving point in this book is that math is a wonderful, interesting and almost magical or mystical entity at times. In one chapter Bellos describes the amazing race to find the most digits of pi and the highest prime number. He also goes over Euclidian geometry and its uses and even has a brief chapter on the psychology of math. This is obviously quite a biased view, as he himself admits that he is a mathematician as well as a journalist. However, this bias is not surprising and should not be an issue, because if you are reading this book you should at least have some interest in math, and even if you don’t you may still find this book enlightening. Alex Bellos’ writing style turns a regularly dry subject into something interesting and fun. He chooses to talk about interesting and applicable sectors of math as in an entire chapter devoted to math-based puzzles such as Sudoku. Bellos talks about math in a real life applicable way making this book much more appealing to the public. One of the downsides of this book is that it never stays on one topic of math long enough to really learn a whole lot about that topic. It seems to skim over many very interesting topics, sparking my interest but not giving me much more than an overview of each of these topics. The book sometimes just seems like a collection of interesting facts about math, and never really discusses any topics to their true potential. This book is quite a departure from regular mathematical literature. For one, its target audience isn’t math whizzes, which makes it readable but also inhibits the depth that it can go into. I would say that this book is a sort of introduction to mathematical literature. It is great for getting you interested in many areas of math but if you want more you may have to turn to other books.
“Here’s looking at Euclid” by Alex Bellos is a book about mathematics. It is very general and gets into multiple, almost unrelated, facets of math. This book is aimed at math nerds and non math oriented people alike. Although Bellos does get into some fairly complex topics, he gives detailed explanations of all the concepts that he is covering, making the book quite readable. The driving point in this book is that math is a wonderful, interesting and almost magical or mystical entity at times. In one chapter Bellos describes the amazing race to find the most digits of pi and the highest prime number. He also goes over Euclidian geometry and its uses and even has a brief chapter on the psychology of math. This is obviously quite a biased view, as he himself admits that he is a mathematician as well as a journalist. However, this bias is not surprising and should not be an issue, because if you are reading this book you should at least have some interest in math, and even if you don’t you may still find this book enlightening. Alex Bellos’ writing style turns a regularly dry subject into something interesting and fun. He chooses to talk about interesting and applicable sectors of math as in an entire chapter devoted to math-based puzzles such as Sudoku. Bellos talks about math in a real life applicable way making this book much more appealing to the public. One of the downsides of this book is that it never stays on one topic of math long enough to really learn a whole lot about that topic. It seems to skim over many very interesting topics, sparking my interest but not giving me much more than an overview of each of these topics. The book sometimes just seems like a collection of interesting facts about math, and never really discusses any topics to their true potential. This book is quite a departure from regular mathematical literature. For one, its target audience isn’t math whizzes, which makes it readable but also inhibits the depth that it can go into. I would say that this book is a sort of introduction to mathematical literature. It is great for getting you interested in many areas of math but if you want more you may have to turn to other books.
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