Here’s Looking at Euclid.

In case you’re interested, amazon has the Blu-Ray edition of The Lord of the Rings trilogy on sale for $49.99 (almost 60% off). Not sure how long that sale will last.

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Alex Bellos’ Here’s Looking at Euclid (known as Alex’s Adventures in Numberland in the U.K.) is a little lighter than the last math book I read, focusing instead of numerical oddities and paradoxes as well as the history of basic math. He keeps the tone light by revolving each chapter around one or more interesting personalities, such as the English dentist who used &#981 (the golden ratio) to design more attractive dentures or the various people involved in the invention and rise of sudoku.

Bellos’ gift with this book is to take mathematical subjects that might seem intimidating, such as the nature of irrational numbers like &#981 and &#960 or the concept of the normal distribution, and wraps them in interesting, easily accessible stories that might be enjoyed even by the math-phobic. There’s also an undercurrent here, only mentioned explicitly in one chapter, of sentiment that we don’t really do a good job of teaching math in American public schools. He talks about the need for someone to develop the number zero, without which no numerical system can properly function, and discusses a tribe in the Amazon that has no word for any number larger than five. The chapter on probability revolves around – what else? – gambling, from a conversation with a slot-machine developer to stories of people who figured out how to beat the house and forced changes like more frequent shuffling of more decks at the blackjack table. The final chapter was a real rarity, as it brought together one of my interests (math) with one of my wife’s (crafting) with a discussion of hyperbolic crochet, a way of building models of surfaces with constant negative curvature using yarn, which leads into a discussion of infinity and, of course, a stop at the Hilbert Hotel.

The book is not a straight narrative, but a series of chapters that can stand on their own, although Bellos tries to put them in a logical order from smaller concepts to larger ones. Readers generally interested in math will likely read it straight through – and quickly, as I did, because it’s well-written and I love the topic – but the design does allow anyone frustrated by the mathier sections to just jump ahead to the next part or the next chapter. There’s very little in here that a high school junior wouldn’t follow, however; calculus is mentioned but never used, and the hardest conceptual material appears in the final chapter.

Sudoku fans among you might be surprised to read about the puzzle’s history in the chapter “Playtime,” about math-based puzzles (including comments from Martin Gardner, not long before he died). A square of n smaller squares containing all the integers from 1 to n where all the rows, columns, and corner-to-corner diagonals add up to the same total is called a “magic square,” and has been known and studied since antiquity in Chinese, Indian, and Arab cultures, even finding favor with modern mathematicians like Leonhard Euler. The closest predecessor of modern Sudoku was first designed in 1979 by an American, Howard Garns, but redesigned by a Japanese puzzle maker named Maki Kaji and popularized by a New Zealand man named Wayne Gould, who saw one of Kaji’s puzzles in 1997 and wrote a computer program to generate them en masse. (For whatever it’s worth, I can’t stand sudoku.)

I’d love to see Bellos tackle more difficult mathematical material, given how well he translated the subjects he covered here into plain English and his ability to build a narrative around one or more people that kept the book from ever becoming dry. But I can imagine a sequel to Here’s Looking at Euclid (although I shudder to imagine the potential titles – Are Euclidding Me?) that keeps the material on the same level, as the world of math and numbers has far more stories to tell than Bellos fit into this one book.

Next up: Write More Good: An Absolutely Phony Guide, written by the very funny folks behind the @FakeAPStylebook Twitter account. I’ve read 75 pages so far, but that’s enough to know that every writer in the world will find at least something in here that s/he finds absolutely hilarious, since it touches on all areas of writing and has enough one-liners and short sections that there’s a good mix of dry humor and crude. I received review copies of both this and Euclid from the publishers.