Jordan Ellenberg

A popular entry in the category, mathematics for the uninformed, this one addresses many of the usual intellectual problems, e.g. regression to the mean, the law of large numbers, what a p value means, expected value, etc. I think most readers with a technical education will be familiar with all the "answers", so what's so good about this book? The author writes well, he does not avoid the use of some mathematical symbols and graphs, and, both a strength and a weakness, he does not tell a straight story, but mixes related concepts and different historical figures together to perhaps make the chapters more approachable.… (més)

I was the student who got lost on the first day of geometry class in high school and never got found again. I was glad to find this book, because I thought maybe it would fill in the missing pieces of my geometric education; for example, I thought it would explain to me, in simple terms, why I should care about geometry (admittedly, there is some of that in the last chapter). Renowned mathematician Jordan Ellenberg begins with a section that quotes Wordsworth, and I thought, good! I am in familiar territory! Yet the rest of the book is a highly technical look at earthly phenomena such as pandemics, elections, and artificial intelligence to name a few. I got to the end, but I didn't absorb much.

I'm not sure for whom this book was written, but I am sure it wasn't written for me.… (més)