Alex’s Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos.

A brief review by ilian herzi.

Overview:

If I had the ability, I would make this book required reading for all high schools. Alex Bellos makes mathematical concepts intuitive by explaining their origins and explaining them well. Adventures in numberland shows that math is interesting.

In our world today, math is taught without context or an appreciation for its origin. Fundamentally, math is the language of the world around us. Pedal’s of a plant tend to sprout according to a Fibonacci pattern, hawks circle their prey in a logarithmic spiral, observations of natural phenomena (like when you wake up usually in the morning!) tend to follow a normal distribution, the list is uncountably infinite (maybe not I can’t really prove or disprove this statement).

Math, inherently, is beautiful because it has the power to describe everything! But in most schools, the beauty of math is beaten out of us. Most math classes jam complicated principles in our heads. In high school, we learn how to graph ellipses without telling us that learning the nature of ellipse is equivalent to learning the motion of the heavens. When we first learn, sin, cos, tan we don’t understand that these functions arise in the motion of light. And even in probability theory, we’re taught different probabilistic functions haphazerdly without realizing that the core of probability theory wrestles with the uncertainty of our observations. What’s missing is the context behind what we’re learning. Without it, we have no intuition behind math.

For example, if I flip a coin and I measure exactly where the force of the coin was applied, how every molecule in the air will collide with the coin, and I measure where and when the coin will land in my hand (assuming these are the only factors effecting the coin) I will know precisely whether the coin lands heads or tails!

But most of the time we don’t know all these factors, so we assume we’re uncertain. And hence, probability theory is born ; it can now be used to describe a coin flip.

I would recommend this book to anyone who loves math and wishes to glimpse how all of mathematics should be taught.

Overall Rating: 9.5/10