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Your Mileage May Vary
Book Review: Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities, by Ian Stewart
Skimming through reviews on Goodreads, this book seems to have disappointed a few people, and I can see why. It is not quite the book I had hoped for, although quite a lot of it is. I wanted some interesting randomness, I suspected I would already know a few things but there would be some discoveries. And that is what I got. But I wasn't looking for brain-teasers, and there were quite a few of those too; I found them irritating because I didn't want to get out pen and paper whilst reading, and in any case, many of them either required a trick of lateral thinking, or else just a brute force method (or at least, no other method was explained). Some readers had the opposite problem, that they wanted the brain-teasers but not the more descriptive, exploratory stuff. I suppose it's difficult to know what to include in such a book, it's not a history or a focus on a specific topic, but it is an accumulation of curious knowledge acquired over the years. I found particularly interesting topics such as Legislating (in Indiana) the value of pi; Space-Filling Curves and Fractals; Benford's Law; the Poincaré Conjecture; the shape and sound of drums; P=NP?; and somewhere, unnamed, there was a description of an ordering problem that was reminiscent of Arrow's Theorem.
Skimming through reviews on Goodreads, this book seems to have disappointed a few people, and I can see why. It is not quite the book I had hoped for, although quite a lot of it is. I wanted some interesting randomness, I suspected I would already know a few things but there would be some discoveries. And that is what I got. But I wasn't looking for brain-teasers, and there were quite a few of those too; I found them irritating because I didn't want to get out pen and paper whilst reading, and in any case, many of them either required a trick of lateral thinking, or else just a brute force method (or at least, no other method was explained). Some readers had the opposite problem, that they wanted the brain-teasers but not the more descriptive, exploratory stuff. I suppose it's difficult to know what to include in such a book, it's not a history or a focus on a specific topic, but it is an accumulation of curious knowledge acquired over the years. I found particularly interesting topics such as Legislating (in Indiana) the value of pi; Space-Filling Curves and Fractals; Benford's Law; the Poincaré Conjecture; the shape and sound of drums; P=NP?; and somewhere, unnamed, there was a description of an ordering problem that was reminiscent of Arrow's Theorem.