Customer Reviews

The Secret Life of Numbers: 50 Easy Pieces on How Mathematicians Work and Think

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As a mathematician and teacher, I'm always checking out popular books on math. This book, The Secret Life of Numbers, is subtitled "50 easy pieces on how mathematicians work and think." What we find inside is, in fact, fifty short articles (usually around three or so pages each) which cover a variety of topics from history to breakthroughs to personalities to applications.

There are a number of things to like about this book. I particularly appreciated the fact that Mr. Szpiro attempted to keep us up to date on what is going on in math right now. In math classes, there is a tendency to focus on the far past for achievements in mathematics which distances people today from what is going on.

On the other hand, I did think that the pieces were not as "easy" as advertised. Certainly, a background in math helps to understand what Mr. Szpiro is talking about. I think the fact that these articles are so short is part of the problem. Though brief, they sometimes have an expectation of a certain amount of previous knowledge which makes them less useful for people whose mathematical knowledge might be sketchy.

Still, this is a nice book to dip into from time to time. Though not the type of book I would read straight through, there are plenty of articles here to spark an interest in math and illustrate why math is so important, even for us today.

These are the kind of articles I wish the NY Times Science section would have, but it rarely has any math. Swiss-German people
are lucky to be able to enjoy these journalistic light yet
often profound "easy" pieces, and now they are all available
in beautiful English prose! Perfect present to the math-lover
as well as the math-hater, and of course the math-indifferent.
In other words, to everyone.

How does math research apply to everyday life, and what is the history and process of the math discipline as a whole? The Secret Life of Numbers: 50 Easy Pieces on How Mathematicians Work and Think covers the daily work of the math world, from developing theories and testing logic to unsolved problems and individuals whose applications contributed to solutions. Using case histories as foundations, THE SECRET LIFE OF NUMBERS provides a fine survey of the processes of mathematical questioning.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch