ergative 's review for:

Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Absolutely Everything by Jordan Ellenberg

3.5

challenging informative slow-paced

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 This was a little disappointing. It was good for what it was, but I came in expecting it to be as superb as How Not to be Wrong, which blew my mind wih the chains of connections that united many different real-world applications with the underlying mathematics. Here, there were some real-world applications (Covid spread, gerrymandering), and there were some real mathematical underpinnings, but the intermediate steps were not more math, or more real-world applications, but instead lots of toy scenarios. It subtracted a bit from the richness of the content to spend so much time learning about toy games and toy geometries.