Reading Recommendations

For today’s post, I wish to briefly two books that delve into mathematical themes. So here goes.

Book Review: A Certain Ambiguity by Gaurav Suri and Hartosh Singh Bal

Gaurav Suri and Hartosh Singh Bal. A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel. (New Delhi: Penguin, 2007). Available on Amazon.

Quite out of the blue, a colleague of mine gifted me a book toward the end of the 2018-2019 academic year. It was an unexpected gift, but quite timely since I did not have any holiday reading planned. I guess my colleague chose the book because I am a Mathematics teacher. I wonder, though, how many people would be attracted to a book that purports to be ‘a Mathematical novel’!

I was, however, quite eager to get started with the book. The protagonist of the novel is one Ravi Kapoor, who is a student at Stanford. His grandfather, Vijay Sahni, had been a Mathematician and had instilled in Ravi a love for Mathematics. When Ravi reaches Stanford, he enrolls in a Mathematics course called Thinking About Infinity taught by Professor Nico Aliprantis. During discussions related to the course, Ravi mentions his grandfather, whose name Nico recognizes. When Nico pulls out a paper written by Vijay, Ravi reads a note that indicates that Vijay had been in prison in New Jersey in the early twentieth century. That sets Ravi on a course to discovering why his grandfather had been imprisoned. His digging reveals that Vijay had been charged under an obscure blasphemy law in New Jersey.

The novel is like a braid, with three strands running through it. One strand, of course, is that related to the discussion in the course taught by Nico. The second consists of fictionalized memoirs of various Mathematicians ranging from Euclid to Gauss. The third consists of conversations between the grandfather, Vijay, and Judge John Taylor, appointed to decide whether Vijay should go on trial or be set free. Since Vijay was charged with blasphemy, these conversations also touch on religious themes.  The three strands are woven intricately and play off each other extremely well.

As the title suggests, the book narrates how Vijay and Ravi searched for certainty within Mathematics. I’ll just leave it at that without revealing the outcome of their search. That is for you to discover for I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone who either loves Mathematics or enjoys a well crafted tale.

Book Review: In Pursuit of the Unknown by Ian Stewart

Ian Stewart. In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations that Changed the World. (New York: Basic Books, 2012). Available on Amazon.

I stumbled across this book when a friend mentioned it to me, albeit in quite a vague manner. Once I read the subtitle, of course, I was hooked. As someone who has loved Mathematics for as long as he can remember, I could not resist the temptation to read a book about how Mathematical equations have played a key role in giving us the world we live in today.

As the subtitle suggests, Stewart describes the meaning and influence of seventeen Mathematical equations from all sorts of domains – from geometry to physics and from signal processing to economics. Some, such as the Pythagorean Theorem and E=mc², are what one may call ‘usual suspects’ given that they have entered common discourse even if most people have no clue about what the equations mean or of how to use them. Others are more elusive, such as the Navier-Stokes equation and the Black-Scholes equation, the knowledge of which is restricted only to a handful of people in the know. Still others, such as the second law of thermodynamics and the definitions of the derivative and the imaginary number i, might cause high school students around the world to shudder.

Stewart does a commendable job both of describing the meaning of each equation and of outlining its uses. While some knowledge of Mathematics is definitely helpful, Stewart has not targeted the book toward those with much knowledge of Mathematics. This makes the book far more accessible that it otherwise would have been.

Stewart also does not shy away from the downsides of using Mathematics. He shows that, when Mathematics is used as a tool within other disciplines, the ethical considerations must be dealt with within those disciplines for Mathematics itself is unconcerned about such issues. Thus the power of Mathematics is itself a major drawback for, in allowing itself to be used by other disciplines, it subjects itself to the whims of those disciplines.

The book, as a whole, is a remarkably good read and I could not put it down once I began. For those who benefit daily from the usefulness of Mathematics and who still wonder about why it is taught in schools, I would recommend this book as an eye-opener. Of course, I would recommend this book to anyone who has an inkling of curiosity coursing through their veins!