Alex Bellos

The best-selling author of Here's Looking at Euclid presents a narrative distillation of complex mathematical concepts that traces historical discoveries, surveys India's World Mathematical Congress and profiles grassroots mathematical luminaries.

How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life

The Grapes of Math

Dana Kraft

I don't give up on books easily but two chapters in I had already fallen asleep twice and hadn't found any really interesting nuggets. I love math, too so I wanted to like this one.

Risa C

I read non-fiction usually to feel a sense of wonder that's rooted in something real and this book definitely accomplishes this, in how it manages to parse down complex mathematical concepts to their historical foundations then apply these concepts to real-world phenomena in unexpected (to my own ignorant mind, anyway) ways. Ultimately though, I've forgotten more math than I'll ever care to admit and a lot of the explanations and proofs for the more abstract concepts in around the last quarter of the book went over my head. Still, it was a fascinating peek into this arcane world of numbers and theory that, in the end, determines or explains much of the "real world" than I could have ever guessed.

The Grapes of Math How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life

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