Here's Looking at Euclid by Alex Bellos

This book, subtitled A Surprising Excursion Through the Astonishing World of Math, does not scram out exciting and interesting. However for me it was one of the more interesting books I have read in quite sometime.

I like to learn things, a few months ago I enjoyed the book about the periodic table called The Disappearing Spoon as it told me various nuggets about the elements that I did not know. Perhaps it was Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything ( another of my favorite books ) that opened the trend of these sorts of books.

In this book the author takes us down the path of several theories. Now the first thing I have to accept when I read a book like this is that many things in the book are just going to be beyond my comprehension. I have an inate gift for mental math and consider myself very strong at it. That said my brain does not do abstract well and so much of the higher math is something I have always struggled with.

In our house, for example, my wife rules at Wheel of Fortune while no one can touch me in Jeopardy. I need a definite answer to a problem for it to be in my wheelhouse.

The most interesting things learned in this book were about how humans relate to mumbers, that is in a linear way or logarithmically. The answer is interesting and outlines the difference between cultural influences and those that intrinsic to our gene pool.

We learn about the magic of the number 1089. In reality it is no magic it is just an algebraic equation proved but I prefer to think of it is as magic. We learn why the bithday trick works and why it is not so odd that a person at work shares your birthday and why it is even more likely that two athletes share a birthday. From our hindu friends we learn some interesting and in some cases faster way to multiply large numbers and then we learn that our Hindu friends most likely stole these methods from some ancient Europeans.

Lastly I learned about randomness and how to gamble, play the odds, and with a large enough stake you can almost always break even. I learned a neat little party trick to demonstrate the difference between random and what we our brains think is random.

Now if someone had a little more high math understanding they would either get even more out of the book or perhaps not have the sense of wonder of someone who it runs a little bit above. My rating on this book is excellent though. My wife says she can tell how much I like a book by how much I bug her with the information I am gleaning from it. She, for one, is probably glad that I am done with it.