Serious mathematics at its intriguing, transporting best.
A wide-ranging sojourn into geometry and how it can be applied to real-life situations.
Even for the math-averse, there is something indelibly “primal” and useful about geometry, at least of the Euclidean variety. As University of Wisconsin math professor Ellenberg is quick to note, however, “geometry is the cilantro of math. Few are neutral.” As the author shows, it’s a subject on the move, providing new insights and deployments. “We are living in a wild geometric boomtown, global in scope,” writes Ellenberg in this often humorous, anecdotally rich dive into numerous mathematical theories. (His accessible approach carries over from How Not To Be Wrong, his 2014 bestseller.) The author feels that geometry has a lot to do with integrity and honesty, but he doesn’t want to sacrifice intuition at the altar of logical deduction: “We start from our intuitions about shapes in the physical world (where else could we start?), we analyze closely our sense of the way those shapes look and move, so precisely that we can talk about them without relying on our intuition if we need to.” Ellenberg introduces readers to a bevy of relatable mathematical concepts: the “theory of the random walk” and its implications regarding the unpredictable nature of the stock market; “tree geometry” and how it might help you win certain games; the algorithms that work their ways into tennis matches and the World Series as well as some that recall a bunch of monkeys at typewriters, “reducing literary texts to a binary sequence of consonants and vowels.” Also eye-opening are the author’s discussions of pandemics—progression, decay, and the math of herd immunity—and how geometric processes can “model smallpox, scarlet fever, train derailments, and steam boiler explosions.” In the penultimate chapter, “How Math Broke Democracy (and Might Still Save It),” Ellenberg offers an engrossing discussion of how geometry can help in the fight against gerrymandering.
Serious mathematics at its intriguing, transporting best.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984879-05-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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