A review by profejennifer
E: The Story of a Number: The Story of a Number by Eli Maor

3.0

I may not be a mathematician, but I always loved math in school, and I like reading about math and science (I loved Infinite Powers, for example), so I was excited to read this book. Maor states in the prologue that his goal is "to tell the story of e on a level accessible to readers with only a modest background in mathematics" and promises to minimize the use of mathematical formulas in the text. Given that, I anticipated this book would be similar to Strogatz's in approach, and would be a fascinating look at the history of a number.

I think, however, that Maor and I have a different definition of "modest background." I found the book to be highly technical, and while the longer derivations might have been confined to the appendices, the text was still full of mathematical formulae. If I went verrrrry slowly and tried to pull out all of my old memories from my high school and college calculus classes, I could sort of follow him, but I certainly wouldn't call it accessible.

I'm guessing that math majors and others in fields that use complex math on a daily basis would find the book interesting. I just wasn't his target audience, no matter how he framed his intentions in the prologue.