A review by mostlyshanti
Alex's Adventures in Numberland: Dispatches from the Wonderful World of Mathematics by Alex Bellos

4.0

I'm not the intended audience for this book. The intended audience is professional middle class people who used to like maths but got busy with other things. As a teenager who mostly likes maths, it was maybe a little less relevant to me? Still, I appreciated it for being both entertaining and informative. I definitely recommend it to people who like maths, or who want to like maths more. It was amusing and interesting and basically convinced me that maths is cool after a year of suffering in calculus. Calculus is cool, but when you have to do integration by parts it's hard to remember that. One thing that did strike me though was how white and male all the main players in maths that Bellos talked to were. Like there was an inset of the attendees of Gathering for Gardner and they were all white males. There are like two women-- a anthropological number researcher and the crocheting professor who actually made any contribution according to this book. Indians and Chinese were brought up quite a lot as well, but there were not Africans or South Americans. I think, though, that this is more a problem with the world than it is a problem with the book, but it's definitely worth thinking about. The geometry, the statistics, the sequences, the various proofs-- all interested me and the writing was pretty good.