Edited by Sam Parc
Foreword by Dara Ó Briain
Oxford University y Press 2014, 208 PAGES
PRICE £24.99 (HARDBACK)
ISBN 978-0-198-70181-1
This book is available to order from the OUP website.
Murder, medicine, gambling, sport…; the list of topics to which mathematics contributes is endless. The 50 Visions of Mathematics contains articles on, well, 50 of them! The book celebrates the 50th anniversary (in 2014) of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. It comprises fifty short articles on various aspects of mathematics, together with colour plates containing fifty mathematical images. The contributors come from all over the world and include professors of mathematics, teachers, journalists, students and others.
For those avid viewers of CSI (and others) Graham Divall, a consultant forensic scientist, sheds light on how mathematics can help at a murder scene by reconstructing useful information from the nature, shape and distribution of bloodstains. He shows how a little basic trigonometry goes a long way.
David Spiegelhalter OBE, FRS, FIMA, Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, suggests we need a ‘friendly’ unit of deadly risk! He discusses the ‘micromort’, the measure of a one-in-a-million chance of death and provides some fascinating and very non-intuitive statistics relating to the chances of death in the UK from various transport and medical scenarios. For example: the chances of death from walking or cycling 100 miles is 4 micromorts; that from motorbiking the same distance is 16 micromorts and from a 100 mile car journey is 0.3 micromorts. Compare these with a night in hospital – 75 micromorts; a general anaesthetic – 10 micromorts; or giving birth – 120 micromorts in the UK, 2100 micromorts worldwide average!
If murder and death don’t appeal, how about grooves and knuckleballs? Ken Bray, a theoretical physicist and Senior Visiting Fellow in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Bath, explains why it is important to have grooves in footballs, and why perfectly smooth balls don’t travel as far as those with grooves. If you prefer track and field to ball sports, look at the article on the art of scoring points in the Decathlon by John Barrow FRS, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. Perhaps you like to gamble on sports, in which case read about the mathematics of sports gambling by Alistair Fitt CMath FIMA CSci, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Exchange at Oxford Brookes University, and learn about arbs and arbers!
There are short biographies of a number of mathematicians, including: Bill Tutte, an unsung hero of Bletchley Park; Mary Cartwright, an early contributor to chaos theory; Emmy Noether, who attended the University of Erlangen at a time when women were not officially allowed to get degrees; Sir James Lighthill, the driving force behind the founding of the IMA, and others.
Interspersed among the articles are three collections related to Pythagoras’s theorem. These include serious and not so serious commentaries. My favourite example in the latter category is the following limerick:
A right angled triangle opined
My hypotenuse squared is refined
For if anyone cares
It’s the sum of the squares
Of my other two sides when combined
Motorways; Sherlock Holmes; networks; mysterious numbers; sweets; champagne; interviews; mathematical poetry; ravens and even The Simpsons – this book has them all and more! Don’t miss it!
Alan Stevens CMath FIMA
Book review published directly onto IMA website (February 2014)
Edited by Sam Parc
Foreword by Dara Ó Briain
Oxford University Press 2014, 208 PAGES
PRICE £24.99 (HARDBACK) ISBN 978-0-198-70181-1
A well-known myth has been one of the most challenging issues any mathematics community has faced. What myth? It is the public’s view on maths itself, that maths is no more than just a school calculation-based approach. This is unavoidable since fluency in calculation-based procedures is fundamental before one ascends to learn more mathematical concepts, but is there a way amongst several that could bust this myth and show that mathematics can be applied to the real world? Yes.
The 50 Visions of Mathematics book contains fifty original essays written across a few pages each by various authors, along with three short, humorous and must-read articles related to the world-famous Pythagoras’s theorem, and fifty mathematical pictures. Readers are free to view essays in no particular order since the essays are independent of each other. Here’s an overview of a few favourites of mine, highlighting unexpected yet brilliant real-life applications.
Our understanding of Earth and the universe is largely influenced by science. The Mathematics: The language of the universe essay summarises that maths was, still is, and always will be science’s powerful guide. A good example of this is arguably the most fundamental tool in chemistry, the Periodic Table that was created by discovering chemical elements’ atomic numbers and their mathematical patterns. Another example is the properties of a prime number – the building blocks of numbers, a mystery despite almost 2,000 years worth of research. The modern Internet relies on their properties and so unlocking all secrets of prime numbers will significantly impact the technological era we currently live in.
It is intriguing to observe that the world is small despite being physically enormous compared to us mere humans in size. The It’s a small world really essay explains this phenomenon, providing a clear summary of mathematical tools, such as graph theory. It also incorporates a brilliant picture showing connections between many nodes that can be, for example, people or computers in different places. This picture allows us to see how the world can be small and is so convincing that perhaps we could meet our long-lost relatives in the future.
The Conic section hide and seek essay demonstrates how the Global Positioning System (GPS) functions. To do this, we time-travel back to Ancient Greece. Then, mathematicians studied conic sections to research their properties. This research, along with analytic geometry, has evolved to become the engine behind GPS. It is simply marvellous to realise that around 2,000 year old maths made cutting-edge GPS possible. Admit this – ancient maths did rescue you from being lost!
Finally, in roughly the 16th century, an ancient children’s game called leapfrogging was born for entertainment only. Yet, in the 20th century this game was modified as a mathematical technique to allow scientists to place this at the heart and soul of weather/climate prediction modelling. This allows scientists to predict weather forecasts with ridiculously high prediction. Basically, a children’s game unexpectedly became a powerful mathematical technique.
There are many more essays to read in this book, including biographies on a few past and present greats of mathematics including Sir James Lighthill, the first president of the IMA.
Despite fifty essays by a high number of authors in one book, the almost universal adoption of a short, clear and engaging writing style makes this book extremely accessible to anyone regardless of their mathematical background, or lack of. Personally, it is quite enjoyable to read and discover secrets or realistic applications that I am not aware of, without being bogged down by higher-level mathematical concepts. These concepts are deliberately left as at least a reference at the end of most essays for further reading, which I found a nice feature for my brain and perhaps you too. Ultimately, I’d recommend that this (surprisingly) light-hearted mathematical book should be on your shopping list bar a friendly warning: read this book and you’ll never see mathematics the same again. I know I don’t, especially for GPS.
Ken O’Neill MIMA
Book review published directly onto IMA website (August 2014)