Customer Reviews

Mathematics for the Million: How to Master the Magic of Numbers

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

In "Mathematics for the Million," Hogben takes the reader through the entire evolution of mathematics. He begins with ancient farmers whose meager math skills consisted of knowing the values 1, 2, 3, and "more than three," and shows how these skills grew out of necessity as societies became more complex. Hogben's goals are twofold. First, he means to educate the average person so that math won't remain the esoteric domain of academics. Second, he means to demonstrate that mathematical advances occur when math is used to solve real problems, and not when it's used as intellectual entertainment for an idle leisure class. Hogben succeeds on both accounts, and in doing so he (very subtly) develops a theory which anticipates the structural Marxism of the '50s and '60s, including the work of Louis Althusser, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas. But Hogben's real magic is that he makes all this accessible to anyone: Even those with no math background at all will be doing calculus by the end of the book, even performing calculations to measure the Earth's circumference or the distance to the moon. Never has such an opaque subject been as lucid as in "Mathematics for the Million."

This book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the basis of many mathematical concepts that are taken for granted! Many concepts that are not fully explained in school are delineated brilliantly in M. for the M.! Everything is presented in its historical and societal contexts, thus adding even more meaning to the mathematical principles we use everyday (from basic math to calculus and probability).

I bought a used copy of this book 3 years ago (it was published in 1944). To think that it was written for ordinary people 60 or more years ago is astonishing. One can learn all the math that 99% of people need during their lives. If todays high school students would take the time to learn what is so excellently explained in this book, they would score 650 - 800 on the math SAT exam. One example is: there is a chapter where the author walks you through all the calculations and probabilities needed to set up your own life insurance company! This beats calculating the probability of drawing 3 green balls out of an urn filled with green and red balls. Buy It.

Mathematics is no more black and scary magic, while we go through this book, which was written long ago, but seems to fit right-oh in our life as if perscribed just yesterday.

I've read it some 30 years ago and never forgot the quantum leap it gave me to win over the threat of mathematics.

An excellent book deserving of all praise. If I were packing a book for a day trip and had to go lightly I would take this book. For those who want to understand and not just do math this book is wonderful. Another wonderful book is: Jan Gullberg's "Mathematics From the Birth of Numbers," it is a heavy book for day trips.

When first written (1930s), this book was a sweeping overview of the importance of math in history. Since then, it has become a remarkable part of that history: a popular, enduring encapsulation of what an educated non-mathematician should know.

What this book won't do? It won't teach you how to do math that you didn't already know. As an instructional textbook, it's a bit of a flop (hence, only 4 stars for a book I consider a must-have). It doesn't introduce ideas in a step-by-step manner, and exercises in logarithms are over-represented for a post-modern audience (we now use pocket calculators instead of log tables).

But for someone who has been through the sometimes painful, but ultimately enlightening, process of learning high-school math, Mathematics for the Million is a gem of a work, that makes it all clear in a broad historical context.

To wit, a competent high-schooler who has completed a solid program in geometry and trigonometry has at her disposal as much mathematical knowledge as the most learned Ancient Greek philosopher. She can measure the circumference of the earth, and calculate the position and trajectory of the stars. She can prove the Pythagorean theorem, and apply it to basic problems in architecture, engineering, and construction.

From the discovery of zero and negative numbers, to geometry, to calculus, math continues to define how things are done, and how we understand the universe. The author helps us to appreciate just how much the geometry we teach schoolchildren really did change the world. Not bad for an inexpensive little 70-year-old math book!

This book, jointly with Bertrand Russell's "Story of the Western Philosophy", aim to show that Mathematics and Philosophy, the most abstract of our intellectual creations, are driven by cultural, political and historical forces, too.
Happily, both authors have succeeded with their works.
Hogben describes the historical forces behind mathematical inventions, from early antiquity to the calculus era. And in doing so, he gives to the reader the mathematical ideas and techniques necessary to the "citizenship kit" of our technological society.

This is a fine book for anyone who is looking for a book to sharpen their reasoning skills through mathematics. Knowing how to perform the methods within this book constitutes basic math literacy. The average person's inability to handle quantities and solve rather simple quantitative problems bothers me. This is the kind of book I would recommend to anyone to sharpen their mind.

Hogben's approach is to convey math as it proceeded historically as oppose to logically. It is a nice way to present math, but Hogben often puts down "the English speaking Peoples" and Christians throughout his book. For example, he makes fun of John Napier, the inventor of logarithms! If you can overcome this deficiency, you will find everything from arithmetic to combinations and permutations to calculus to linear algebra. Each subject is independent and the topics covered in Hogben's book are what today's undergraduate is learning in their 500 page and $150+ precalculus/calculus textbooks. This is a remarkable book for independent study; Hogben does not skip steps and explains it painfully and completely. Before my electrical engineering test, I studied only the first ten pages of Hogben's chapter on linear algebra, and found to my surprise how easy the test problems became if you knew a little linear algebra.

I was sold by the back cover quotes from Einstein and H.G. Wells and by the idea of the author leading me from arithmetic to calculus. It's ostensibly a book written so that everyone can understand mathematics. However, the book is not an easy read.

Like one of my students said after I explained to her why I didn't like the book: "the author is multi-tasking." He tries to explain math concepts and show us the history of math at the same time. The result is halfway explained math which the reader has to spend a lot of effort on in order to grasp. This is good mental exercise but as you get deeper and deeper into the book you realize that the author has made it unnecessarily harder by being verbose.

A good number of his sentences are wordy, for example: "It does little credit to contestants of either camp, and the outcome was highly detrimental to the progress of mathematics in the land of Newton's birth." In the land of Newton's birth? Why not just England?

Here's another one: "Laplace, the renowned French astronomer-mathematician who told Napoleon that God is an unnecessary hypothesis, recognized forty years before Babbage, an Englishman, designed the first computing machine, that the number 2 (in our Hindu-Arabic notation) has an immense advantage in terms of the number of different operations we need to perform to carry out a computation such as some our parents had to learn (e.g. finding /4235) the hard way." Not only is this sentence wordy but why did he have to add that Laplace told Napoleon that God was an unnecessary hypothesis or that Babbage was an Englishman and designed the first computing machine?

He also sprinkles his book with gratuitous thoughts and opinions like: "Before discussing this, it may protect the author from unnecessary correspondence to state the truth about one of those historical tags on all fours with the ludicrous assertion that a document called Magna Carta which a circus of half-literate Baronial gangsters forced an English monarch to sign is the Keystone of British and/or United States democracy." This becomes annoying to the reader that has already struggled enough with Mr. Bogden's math explanations to have to worry about whether what he is saying next is something relevant or just him enjoying hearing himself speak.