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Group Theory In The Bedroom, And Other Mathematical Diversions (2008)

by Brian Hayes(Favorite Author)

3.75 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0809052199 (ISBN13: 9780809052196)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Hill and Wang

review 1: Of course, it was the risqué title that caught my eye in the library, and of course, it was not at all a naughty book, but a book of mathematical essays of a highly accessible sort. Brian Hayes is a computer programmer who wrote these articles for a column in American Scientist magazine from the 1990's. Each essay invites the reader into a thought experiment or presents a bit of history behind a mathematical concept or application. Some are trivial, such as the mattress flipping algorithm that is behind the title. Some have more profound social significance, such as the the overview of Lewis Fry Richardson's study of the "The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels", an attempt to tally and comprehend mathematically the impact of crime, rebellion and wars on humankind. Another walk... moreed the reader through "Molecular Economics", which used a simple probabilistic model to suggest that the tendency of the free market is to consolidate money into the hands of the wealthy in the way that rain trickles down to the oceans. If I've got it right, the enormous big new book by Thomas Picketty essentially boils down to that (although he used history and statistics to make his point). Other chapters, especially the ones about the ancient craft of designing clocks and gears, actually echoed around very nicely with some things I've been doing at work trying to understand complex time schedules and repeating events. I'm not a mathematical guy. Any mathematical operator more arcane than an exponent will make my eyes glaze over. I'm probably very close to the target audience for this book, and it worked. It clicked.I only gave it three stars, however. Four stars are reserved for books where I laughed so loud people thought I was crazy. Five stars are for book that are life-changing. This one also had the disadvantage that people in the subway and the elevator thought I was reading something racy, without the advantage of actually being racy.
review 2: A rambling collection of essays. The chapt are all quit different, with a smattering of fairly challenging mathematics, although not mufh of the form of equations. Being a non-mathematician, as interesting and non-mathematical the book topics were, the discussion on topics involved some pretty heavy maths. The chapter on th analysis of wars and the chapter on generation of random numbers were most interesting. On the whole, quitqn enlighting book....definitely not to read in one sitting. less

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