Customer Reviews

Mathematics in Nature: Modeling Patterns in the Natural World

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

For those of us who admire nature and see it as a product of processes both beautiful and rational, Adam's book is the perfect bedside long-termer for anyone more than casually interested in math or the intricate patterns in nature.

This book is chock full of ponderous examples of mathematical simplicity and complexity in nature, and reading it I was constantly reading only one topic and then putting the book down for days to think about and tinker with the question myself.

Good pictures, solid math (I prefer clean, modelistic equations to numerical approximations anyday), and a charming, conversational writing style make this book highly readable and highly inspiring in the way it makes you reexamine your perception of nature as unintegrated or inelegant. The very repetition of mathematical themes throughout nature - such as the omnipresent Golden Ration - proves otherwise.

For me, this is staying on my "constantly referenced" shelf.

I disagree strongly with the previous reviewer. The book is well presented, with some lovely photos, and is nicely produced and attractive. The actual content of the book is equally good. Some of the material is familiar, but the author always seems to take a good fresh look at these topics so I still enjoyed them. There was some new material too, which I particularly enjoyed. This is an excellent book, and I hope that the negative review on Amazon will not discourage potential readers from buying a copy.

Gauss, the famous math genius, once said that mathematics is "the Queen of the Sciences". However, as a non-mathematician I find quite boring opening those books that are crammed with abstruse theorems and demonstrations. To me, the special place math occupies among the sciences emerges when we apply it to modeling nature. It is amazing how the n-fold symmetry in flowers, the pattern exhibited by sand dunes, and optical effects such as rainbows and glories can be mathematically described in a very concise manner. These are but a few natural phenomena and objects that are described in Adam's book. Upon turning each page you will discover an equation or mathematical model of the natural world; for instance, why do honey bees built their honeycombs using hexagonal cells? This has to do with maximizing the region of space covered by such biological structures (the 7-hexagon honeycomb) while minimizing the perimeter. Hence, does nature possess a mathematical struture?
Another important aspect of this beautiful book is that it teaches us how to develop mathematical models of complex, natural systems and phenomenas while selecting only the most important variables (the great physicist Enrico Fermi was a master of mathematical estimations based on simple reasoning). Obviously, this type of exercise requires years of practice as well as a good knowlege of physics and its basic laws. Another nice book written by the same author is "A Mathematical Nature Walk".

Mathematics in Nature is an excellent resource for bringing a greater variety of patterns into the mathematical study of nature, as well as for
teaching students to think about describing natural phenomena mathematically.

The book rehashes familiar material involving estimation.
Unfortunately, no attempt is made to accompany this with
either error or sensitivity analysis. Thus the "conclusions"
drawn are so loose they may well not even be correct to a
single significant figure.
On top of this the steady stream of biblical quotes is
offputting and ungermane. Add to this a mind boggling
infelicity to begin chapter two and you have a real mess.
In terms of technique the author commits the beginner's

mistake of using 'd' for a parameter inside calculus
problems thus making it impossible to distinguish between
multiplication and differentiation.
Readers interested in a far superior treatment may wish to
look at "The Parsimonious Universe" by Tromba & Hildebrandt.