Customer Reviews

The Mathematics of Juggling

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am a mathematical dunce. I have a better than average IQ, I passed high school algebra, I have been juggling for 35 years, and I even came up with diagrams on my own to remember and devise patterns. I thought I would enjoy this book, and I imagine I would if it were at all comprehensible to me. Though the book is hyped as "useful," "accessible" and "entertaining," buyers should be warned that Polster's book is about math and is written entirely in the language of math. There is no effort to bridge the gap between a practical understanding of juggling logic and his numeric abstractions. He writes in plain English prose until 3/4 of the way down page 8, and by the bottom of that page he has ditched you and disappeared into a world of opaque notation that might as well have been written by G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. If page after page of greek letters, academic jargon and abstract equations is easy reading for you, get this book. If you don't already speak higher math, Polster isn't going to teach you how.

For a book that does what Polster does not, find Laws of Form by G. Spencer Brown.

I have a master's degree in math and an interest in juggling. I am sure the author has a good understanding of the mathematics of juggling; however he does not seem to be able to convey it in a clear or understandable fashion. I tried reading through this several times and found it too confusing to get through, as things seemed to appear out of thin air with no background exposition. I feel I learned a few things from the book, but overall am disappointed.

Polster manages to take the innocuous pastime of juggling and segue from it into number theory. The movement of balls is shown to map naturally into the concepts of finite state graphs. Bringing in ideas of permutations. And introducing juggling matrices!

Plus, he points out that the founder of Information Theory, Claude Shannon, was also interested in the theory of juggling. Several crucial juggling theorems were discovered by Shannon and are named after him. For readers familiar with Shannon in computing, the book gives a look at relatively little known research by him.

I had no idea this much had been written about the mathematics of juggling, or that Claude Shannon was a juggler, until I stumbled across this book. It was a bit much for me to delve into deeply at the time, but I hope to come back and read it properly at some point. Definitely worth a look for my fellow math and juggling geeks.