Tag Archives: review

Book reviews: The Joy of SET and Elements of Mathematics

Posted on March 14, 2017 by Brent

I have a couple of book reviews for you today! I finished both of these books recently and really enjoyed them. Though they are quite different, both gave me new ways to think about some topics I already knew, and … Continue reading →

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Book review: Genius at Play

Posted on May 13, 2016 by Brent

Back in January I mentioned that I had been enjoying Siobhan Roberts’s new biography, Genius at Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway. I finally finished it, and can now officially say that I really enjoyed it. This is … Continue reading →

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Book review: Guesstimation 2.0

Posted on March 30, 2013 by Brent

Guesstimation 2.0: Solving Today’s Problems on the Back of a NapkinLawrence Weinstein I got a review copy of this book, and initially decided I wasn’t going to review it—I hate those sorts of consulting-company-interview estimation problems, you know, like “what … Continue reading →

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Book review: The Irrationals

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Brent

The Irrationals: A Story of the Numbers You Can’t Count On Julian Havil Princeton University Press sends me lots of cool books to review! Here’s one. Remember the irrational numbers, which can’t be expressed as a ratio of integers ? … Continue reading →

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Book review: Viewpoints: Mathematical Perspective and Fractal Geometry in Art

Posted on November 18, 2011 by Brent

This book is certainly quite different from the sort I usually read and review—but I am always interested in new and creative ways to teach mathematics! This is quite a fun book. It’s all about visual art and some of … Continue reading →

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Book review: Magical Mathematics

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Brent

Occasionally someone from Princeton University Press sends me a list of upcoming titles and asks if there are any I’d like to review. I jumped when I saw this one: a book about magic tricks and math! By Persi Diaconis … Continue reading →

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Learn You a Haskell!

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Brent

I have written several times before about using the Haskell programming language as a tool for exploring mathematics, but until now I had no good recommendation for people who were interested in learning it for that purpose (Real World Haskell … Continue reading →

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Book review: The Mathematical Mechanic

Posted on August 1, 2009 by Brent

I am not a physicist. My high school physics class was taught by a man who was probably brilliant. I say “probably” because he was so bad at explaining things that it was impossible to tell. His lectures went like … Continue reading →

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New bookshelf entry: The Annotated Turing

Posted on January 26, 2009 by Brent

For my birthday I got, among other things, a copy of The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine, by Charles Petzold. I haven’t finished reading it yet, but so far, … Continue reading →

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