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Pure mathematical gold, David Acheson's enthralling and insightful volume is brimful of nuggets that will make mathematics accessible to everyone. From deceptively simple beginnings, the thrilling journey takes the reader all the way through to some deep mathematical ideas, via Kepler andNewton, explaining what calculus really means, and even giving a brief history of pi. Every short page is carefully crafted to ensure no one will be lost along the way and the final destination is possibly the most beautiful and surprising mathematical statement in history. Packed with puzzles andillustrated with the help of world famous cartoonists, before the reader even notices they'll know more about chaos theory and imaginary numbers than they ever expected.… (more)
User reviews
If you enjoyed this book, and actually want to learn something, read Acheson's [Calculus and Chaos], which is a general course in calculus and differential equations, and with a bit of persistance you will actually understand these difficult subjects, which are not really difficult at all.
The risk, of course, for anyone of Acheson’s mathematical prowess writing for the general public is that almost anything that might be included in such a book will be seen as “simple” by him. Indeed, whether it is the following simple example, or something that can be seen simply, or by performing some simple algebra, the general reader rather quickly gets the impression that it is they themselves who are simple. That’s not really a complaint. No one reads a book like this hoping to learn that mathematicians are no more clever than the rest of us. We read it, I suspect, to be amazed. And for the most part, I was.
Gently recommended.