1) Maths is a fantastic subject.  You ought to learn it.

I was never particularly good at maths.  I still recall never being able to get my head around adding (or was it multiplying?) fractions, and having to go up to Mrs Moody to have her explain it to me.  This was a particularly unusual circumstance for ten- or eleven-year-old me, since I *never* asked for help with anything to do with schoolwork.

I wasn’t too bad in the three years leading up to GCSE, seeming to get my head around everything with the minimum of fuss.  I soon learnt the reason for this when I transferred schools at 14 (Leicestershire children do the start of high school from 11 to 14, then move to another for 14+) ready for my GCSEs: My previous school avoided anything challenging.  The other children at my new school were familiar with Pythagoras and other aspects of geometry.  The deepest we had delved was an introduction to π.

Within a few weeks I had been moved to the top set, though wasn’t by any means a reflection of great ability on my part.  I think that I just happened to span the two sets and they decided to move me up.  Anyway, I eventually got an A.  Once more, no great indicator of aptitude, more a reflection on how little one needs to know to score an A grade in this country.

A-levels were something else.  My lack of grounding in geometry and a work ethic that meant never working at home meant that I struggled.  I can’t say that I was the worst in the class because there was someone who routinely scored marks that wouldn’t even graze double-digits, but he was embarrassingly stupid so doesn’t count.

Interestingly, I did have aptitude in those areas that were built purely on intuition, and shocked the teacher by top-scoring in an applied mathematics test, but, again, I’d not done any work to prepare me for it.  I scraped a C in the end, after having attended weekend classes to try to catch up.

University wasn’t so bad, at least until I got to my final year, by which time my advanced micro- and macroeconomics courses were flooded with algebra.  To complicate matters, things went full circle, the solutions to these problems requiring me to manipulate fractal indices.  Ouch.

Still, I survived and scored firsts in these subjects, and learnt not to be so intimidated by mathematics.

More importantly, I started to buy the occasional book on the subject.

I read Petr Beckmann’s A History Of Pi, Eli Maor’s e: The Story Of A Number, and Robin Wilson’s Four Colours Suffice: How the Map Problem Was Solved.  All of these were fascinating, so much fun to read.

More books followed to the point where one could be forgiven thinking that I’m a proper maths geek (as well as a wrestling nerd, language buff, history-lover, economics bore, and Transformers fanatic) by looking at my book collection.

Well that’s partially true.  I find mathematics to be fascinating, it’s history full of interesting characters, some of whose stories could be the subject of fiction.  The first person whose name jumps into my head when I think of that is Évariste Galois.  This boy Revolutionary was imprisoned, shot at whilst confined, and eventually died, aged just twenty, in a duel.  Fascinating.

I have the good fortune to be “significant other”‘d to a young lady with a similar maths interest, although hers is a little more obvious since she scored a first in the subject.

Following the misadventure of the Moosemobile Radio assuaged her guilt complex by buying me a little, maths-related gift.

It was a superb book called “50 Mathematical Ideas You Really Need To Know”, whence the title of this post.

The premise is very simple.  There are 50 headings of subjects that the author writes about, each being featured across a span of four pages.  This bit-size approach means that a lot can be covered in a small space,  hence more fitting into the book.

I thought it was great, so much fun to read, thoroughly enjoying it and making short work of it.

Radio later told me that she very nearly didn’t get me that one, since there were two more books in the collection.

Well, I had been doing a three-week-long, intensive course in mathematics at university, and talk of physics had come up every now and again during the teaching.  My PhD supervisor is a proper maths buff, much more enamoured with the subject than I am, so it seemed a natural progression for me to take some degree of interest in physics, since he was speaking a lot about overlap between the various disciplines that he knew.

This was a fairly easy conundrum to solve.  I wanted to read snippets about physics.  I had just read a book that was great fun which presented maths in snippets.  This same book was available for physics.  Do the maths.

So I read it.  I can’t pretend that I enjoyed it to the same degree that I did the maths book because I didn’t, but it was a reasonable enough book which required a small expenditure of time and effort in order to soak up an introduction to the science of the physical world.

Not to be outdone, I bought the third book in the series soon after, this time revolving around philosophy.  I had very little in the way of anticipation for this one but was pleasantly surprised to find things that I knew from economics in there, as well as concepts that I had voiced whilst walking to school with a friend.  A philospher young was I.

There is a fourth in the series, this time on management ideas. I tell myself that I’m going to draw the line there and not get it, but I know myself well enough to be certain that I’ll decide to finish the set one day.

Anyway, the whole point of this thread was to mention Quercus’s series “50 Ideas You Really Need To Know About …” and inform you that they make splendid little books. The covers are cracking, the lay-out is perfect, and so is the structure. These are well worth getting your hands on.

Stop Press! Whilst locating the book covers on Amazon so that I can use them in the body of this blog, I’ve just discovered that there are more in the series due for release. In April next year there’s a fair chance that my bookshelves could be welcoming additional works on genetics and psychology

Tags: Mathematics, Quercus

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 12:54 am and is filed under Books, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.