An English major in college and a deep lover of books as my first friends in only-childhood, I might at any one time be reading a novel, a memoir, a science book and some poems. But rarely – if ever – am I reading a book about math.
So I was surprised to start hearing of a multitude of new books about numbers that sound both fascinating and relatable to everyday life. As we re-air "Searching for Order in the Universe" this weekend, which features a segment on "Seeing the World With A Mathematician’s Eyes," this new (to me at least) genre of Math Lit comes at a moment when many of us are looking for things that can be controlled, or explained or as simple as a factual equation.
A New Math Lit reading list:
"Numbers Don’t Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World" by Vaclav Smil
"Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy and Everything Else" by Jordan Ellenberg
"The Data Detective" by Tim Harford
"The Ten Equations that Rule the World" by David Sumpter
"Curves for the Mathematically Curious" by Julian Havil
Reading these books will probably not improve my ability to help my kids with their calculus or algebra homework, but I’m intrigued to find out what these mathematicians have to say about our world.
–Shannon