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The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity Hardcover – October 2, 2012

by Steven Strogatz (Author)

313 customer reviews

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A world-class mathematician and regular contributor to the New York Times hosts a delightful tour of the greatest ideas of math, revealing how it connects to literature, philosophy, law, medicine, art, business, even pop culture in ways we never imagined

Did O.J. do it? How should you flip your mattress to get the maximum wear out of it? How does Google search the Internet? How many people should you date before settling down? Believe it or not, math plays a crucial role in answering all of these questions and more.

Math underpins everything in the cosmos, including us, yet too few of us understand this universal language well enough to revel in its wisdom, its beauty and its joy. This deeply enlightening, vastly entertaining volume translates math in a way that is at once intelligible and thrilling. Each trenchant chapter of The Joy of x offers an aha! moment, starting with why numbers are so helpful, and progressing through the wondrous truths implicit in p, the Pythagorean theorem, irrational numbers, fat tails, even the rigors and surprising charms of calculus. Showing why he has won awards as a professor at Cornell and garnered extensive praise for his articles about math for theNew York Times, Strogatz presumes of his readers only curiosity and common sense. And he rewards them with clear, ingenious, and often funny explanations of the most vital and exciting principles of his discipline.

Whether you aced integral calculus or arent sure what an integer is, youll find profound wisdom and persistent delight inThe Joy of x.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Guest Review by Janna Levin

Janna Levin is a Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Barnard College of Columbia University. She has contributed to an understanding of black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves in the shape of space time. She is the author of the popular-science book, How the Universe Got Its Spots and a novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, which won the PEN/Bingham prize. Janna was recently named a Guggenheim Fellow (2012).

I loved this beautiful book from the first page.

Mathematicians are in a peculiar predicament. Mathematical beauty is patent to them. And in the perception of that beauty is pleasure, is joy. But that pleasure is not easily shared. Mathematical beauty eludes many others, or even most others.

Steven Strogatz wants to share that joy. He sees the beauty of pi and 0 and infinity. But he doesn’t want to impose his impressions on you or to report on the view from his privileged perspective. He wants you to see it too. He doesn’t want to argue that mathematics is creative and beautiful. He wants you to experience the visceral pleasure for yourself.

To that end, he disassembles mathematics as a discipline, both feared and revered, and reassembles mathematics as a world, both accessible and magical.

If you have never braved this grand world, put away your math anxiety, your preconceptions. This book is the most welcoming entree to mathematical thinking that I know of.

If you have braved this grand world, you will find a collection of gems, new ways of inhabiting the domain. Strogatz links historical anecdotes to new insights, as though the math itself is sculptural, composed of forms that are simultaneously familiar and ethereal. The logic seems effortless so that each module snaps into its complement with a gratifying click.

This book is a rebuttal to the accusation that mathematical abstraction is cold or inhuman. Mathematics is no more intrinsically cold or inhuman than language. And Strogatz lends a warmth and humanity to both.

The Joy of x is, well, a joy.

From Booklist

When Strogatz invites grade-schoolers to construct Möbius strips with scissors, crayons, and tape, he is not expecting them to discover revolutionary new mathematical principles. But he does expect them to experience the kind of intellectual joy that sustains a lifetime of mathematical inquiry. Readers share that joy by joining Strogatz on a high-spirited romp through complex numbers, standard deviations, infinite sums, differential equations, and other mathematical playgrounds. The math arrives in such delightful episodes—a hike through a snow-covered field, for example, or an excited dinner conversation over symbols scribbled on a napkin—and is so often connected to poetry, sports, and popular TV shows that even math phobes will find themselves swept up in the fun. (Who knew that The Sopranos could help us fathom calculus?) To be sure, Strogatz occasionally points well-schooled readers to the rigorous analyses identified in his endnotes. But even those reluctant to venture into deeper waters will finish this book with a new relish for mathematics as a thrilling adventure, not a dreary chore. --Bryce Christensen

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Product details

Hardcover: 316 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (October 2, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0547517653
ISBN-13: 978-0547517650
Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.2 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
Average Customer Review: 313 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #280,817 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2361 in Applied Mathematics (Books)
- #264 in Mathematics History

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D. Armstrong

Entertaining and interesting - but don't get the Kindle edition....

May 12, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

An entertaining, well-written and informative book - suitable for folks with little or no background in math, but also for those who know a fair bit of math (you will still learn a lot, I suspect). Amusingly written, with a pleasing authorial voice.

One serious problem with the Kindle edition: the extensive and informative notes at the end of the book are not properly linked within the body of the text - no reference links or footnotes numbers at all! So, you don't know which topics in a given chapter have notes, and you don't even know about the existence of said notes until you stumble on them at the end. So, go for the paper edition, *not* the Kindle edition.

Whoever does the technical editing for Kindle editions of non-fiction is doing a rotten job - several other books I have purchased for the Kindle have had similar issues. I am tempted to only use the Kindle for fiction, not for non-fiction.

Too bad Amazon doesn't allow one to rate the content separately from a rating on the digitization for the Kindle; I gave 5 stars for content, but would have rated the technical aspects of the Kindle at best 2 stars....

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Robert Nagle

Kindle edition is fine on color tablets! (but it's a big file)

December 6, 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I just want to address one matter of how the kindle ebook looks. This book has lots of illustrations and formulas -- as you would expect for a popular approach to math. I'm reading this on a 9 inch color tablet (reading on the kindle app for android). Everything renders beautifully. Perhaps the rendering isn't as good on e-ink devices, but I'd bet that the real issue is screen size. (i.e., a 6 inch device probably would be a struggle to read). There are a lot of graphics and photos; it's a pretty book, but because of the large file size, you might consider removing your local copy and keeping it on the cloud when you're done.

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Kindle Customer

A shallow summary of some topics of mathematics

April 16, 2019

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

At first it seemed that the title "Joy of X" was spot on. It's an admirable goal to inspire readers about mathematics and I found the first few chapters very well written and interesting, with some insight about the (primary- or middle-school level) mathematical topics.

The writing is decent throughout the book but the quality of the content quickly plunges and each chapter becomes a shallow, broad description of a particular subject without much detail or examples. Each chapter is about the same in length (apparently these chapters appeared in the NYT as essays?) - unfrotunately, later chapters are more fit for some Sunday tabloid's filler than a book about mathematics. While the original NYT publications may have had length limits because of the newspaper format, there's no excuse for re-publishing the same content in a book where such limits don't exist.

It's fairly obvious that the author understands and loves mathematics and the first few chapters give the impression that his goal was to genuinely inspire people but the result falls flat in this regard. There's barely any detail about the more complex topics; some anectodes are thrown in for "warmth" but most of it feels like an afterthought. Several chapters refer the reader to Youtube videos and blog entries (some don't even exist anymore) instead of actually diescribing the subject. I think most readers would be better off reading about these subjects on WIkipedia.

Some of the 5-star ratings are suspect, bordering on dishonesty - no one with deeper undestanding of the subject would recommend this book as "magical", "grand" and the like. As much as I wanted to love this book (especially after the first few chapters) I cannot recommend it.

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From counting to discovering that some infinities are greater than others.

December 16, 2014

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

A few times I've seen postings on Facebook where people are proud of the fact that they "got through another day without using math". I'm amused but a little sad that they think math is unnecessary in day-to-day life. I wonder if they really didn't use math or did it without thinking of it as math.Or is it true that since they don't have a background in math they just ignore the problems in their lives where math could help Now, I confess I was an English major and ignored math and the sciences; but I've come to undertstand that more math would have been helpful.

Steven Strogatz shows us the basic concepts of numbers and math, building from the simple: Sesame Street characters counting fish, to the mind boggling: some infinities are larger than others.

We first learn about the power of numbers when we go from calling out "fish, fish, fish" for each fish we see to grouping them together in the abstract idea of "three fish". Numbers are abstract ideas we use to stand in so we can easily measure and compare things. Once we build a set of relationship rules (addition, subtraction) we continue to develop methods of relationships. For example we build fractions as "ratios of integers - hence teir technical name, rational numbers." (p 29). These rules continue to build upon one another and take us through algebra and geometry to calculus. As an example Strogatz demonstrates that adding "all the consecutive odd numbers, starting from 1: The sums above, remarkably, always turn out to be perfect squares" (p10).

My biggest takeaway from the book is that when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You can only use the tools in your belt to solve the problems you encounter. And worse if you do use the tools in your belt you may get the wrong answer. Or worse yet; you may have the correct tool set but use them dishonestly to misdirect people - those people like me - who didn't study enough math.

An example of that is statistics, where figures lie and liers figure. Most of us have at least a passing understanding of normal distributions (bell curves). They "can be proven to arise whenever a large number of mildly random effects of similar size, all acting independently, are added together. And many things are like that." (p 178). Many, but not all. "[P]lenty of phenomena deviate from this pattern yet still manage to follow a pattern of their own." (p 178). But we are more comfortable with the normal distributions and have the tools (the mean average) to work with them. In Power-law distributions the "modes, medians, and means do not agree because of the skewed, asymmetrical shapes of their L-curves. President Bush made use of this property when he stated that his 2003 tax cuts had saved families an average of $1,586 each. Though that is technically correct, he was conveniently referring to the mean rebate, a figure that averaged in the whopping rebates of hundreds of thousands of dollars received by the richest 0.1 percent of the population. The tail on the far right of the income distribution is known to follow a pwoer law, and in situations like this, the mean is a misleading statistic to use because it's far from typical. Most families, in fat got less that %650. The median was a lot less than the mean." (p. 180)

I've been intimidated by calculus but Strogatz does an effective job of making it approachable - you won't learn calculus from the book but you'll get a glimmer of understanding. If we want to find the area of a circle we start by fitting a square inside and calculate its area; then turn it into an 8 sided figure - like slices of a pizza - and calculating its area we get closer yet. And so on as the number of pie slices approaches infinity.

Strogatz wraps things up with the theory of infinite sets using the illustration of the Hilbert Hotel which is always full but there is always room for one more. I can't do it justice here but he shows how the infinity of the real numbers between 0 and 1 is bigger than the infinity of whole numbers. Whaaaat?

Finally I became acquainted with the "recreational mathemusician" Vi Hart through this book. She is a video illustrator who does some marvelous work demonstrating mathematic concepts. Even if you don't read this book (which you totally should), check out Vi Harts story of Wind and Mr. Ug; a couple of two dimensional beings who live on a transparent Möbius strip.

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The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity Hardcover – October 2, 2012

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