Five of the best books on mathematics | Books

TThe sheer number of books on numbers makes choosing five math-related books a challenge. Since the Egyptian scribe Ahmes wrote papyrus sometime around 1550 BC to explain how to calculate the slope of a pyramid, there have been over three millennia of mathematics literature. So, with a certain degree of statistical certainty: here is a selection of the best math books of all time.

Mathematics, Magic and Mystery by Martin Gardner

This is a seminal book about math for fun. For much of human history, books about math have tended to be practical in nature, since numbers and calculations are essential tools for building a civilization. Martin Gardner’s work dealt with math for its own sake; something that amateurs could do as a hobby. His column in Scientific American inspired generations of math enthusiasts. This book was published shortly before the column’s launch and was many people’s first introduction to using math for magic tricks.

This book (and the accompanying television documentary) gave the general public a taste of what it was like to be a casual mathematician working on a difficult problem. But that’s not to say it was a typical problem: Fermat’s Last Theorem had been posed as a challenge as early as 1637, and it took more than 350 years for British mathematician Andrew Wiles to crack it in 1995. The book was hugely popular, and used this celebrity problem to shed light on the everyday experiences of mathematicians around the world.

Mathematics is not just a hodgepodge of age-old problems and pyramid building. It can also explain why you can wait forever for one bus before three come at once. Rob Eastaway and Jeremy Wyndham took math off its pedestal and showed how it applies to everything around us in our daily lives. I remember reading this book on the school bus as a teacher and looking up to see the other two buses following behind, and it changed the way I approached teaching math.

In hindsight, it may seem obvious that AI would become an important aspect of our modern lives, but Hannah Fry was ahead of her time when she wrote about the potential impact algorithms would have on us. As relevant today as it was when it was published six years ago, Hello World is an excellent explanation of how algorithms are not supernatural intelligence, but rather expressions of our own beliefs and biases.

The other side of the AI ​​coin is big data. Caroline Criado Perez’s book deals with two different modern aspects of data. Its main thesis is that data sets, much like algorithms, are not an objective reservoir of potential insights, but can contain massive omissions: especially in the case of women, half the population. Furthermore, Perez shows the power of data by backing up every step of her argument with facts and statistics. It is both a cautionary tale and a practical guide to dealing with data.