- Paperback
- Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; First Edition edition (1997)
- ISBN-10: 0297819925
- ISBN-13: 978-0297819929
- ASIN: B0026K5LQK
- Product Dimensions: 23 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 434,724 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In this book Ian Stewart does his usual astonishing act of making some fairly high level mathematics understandable to the layman. Always entertaining, he takes the reader on a journey through the maze that maths can seem to the outsider and gives us a picture of how the rather strange minds of proffessional mathematicians work. He opens a number of areas of maths out to our view but to my mind the best chapter comes when he is showing the purely non-obvious outcomes of statistics. Excellent stuff.
21 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
As a first year maths undergraduate looking for something enjoyable and readable that would also help to keep me in a mathematical mood over the long summer vacation I turned to this book with high expectations and it did not disappoint. It addresses a wide variety of aspects of modern maths, some of which were familiar and others completely new to me, linking them together as a journey through a maze, each subject being explained as you move along a passage.
As you pass through the maze, you learn about many things, not just mathematical, but also things from the biological world, for example. The text is equally accessible to people with no maths experience as it assumes very little knowledge, but works through everything bit by bit.
All in all, this is a very enjoyable book for anyone wishing to stretch their mind a little, whilst still being a good read, and is thoroughly recommended.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition
Firstly I got this as a freebie on the kindle and as a result I do not have a complaint. It started off promising but around about half way through I found myself having to reread whole sections of the chapters. Why? I thought the writing had become confused. The explanations started to become confused and I thought it started down a route of telling me how clever the author was.
The first three chapters went through relatively easy topics and although having done Engineering Maths at University 20 years ago, I learnt some new techniques. I then found I had to keep reading passages in Chapters 5 and 6 and decided it was not worth it. The subjects were either too difficult for me to understand, therefore the book has failed in what it sets out to do or the writing was confusing again failing to achieve the fundamental rationale for the book. Chapters 7 & 8 might be better but I had lost the will to carry on. As a taster for the authors other work, I'm sorry but I will not be getting any more.
I knew it was bad when I started reading a dead tree book in preference to this. In the end I think I prefer looking at the world through an engineers eyes. It's not bad it's just not great either.
The first three chapters went through relatively easy topics and although having done Engineering Maths at University 20 years ago, I learnt some new techniques. I then found I had to keep reading passages in Chapters 5 and 6 and decided it was not worth it. The subjects were either too difficult for me to understand, therefore the book has failed in what it sets out to do or the writing was confusing again failing to achieve the fundamental rationale for the book. Chapters 7 & 8 might be better but I had lost the will to carry on. As a taster for the authors other work, I'm sorry but I will not be getting any more.
I knew it was bad when I started reading a dead tree book in preference to this. In the end I think I prefer looking at the world through an engineers eyes. It's not bad it's just not great either.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Heavy going
I downloaded this free for my Kindle, thank goodness. I gather that this book was the basis for a series of Christmas Science lectures, but I sincerely hope that the author did a... Read more
Published 1 month ago by D&M Books, Liverpool
stretching the brainbox
An interesting book which when I started reading I thought it may be aimed more at children but as the booked progressed more and more parts made me start to think harder and when... Read more
Published 1 month ago by A. Morgan
Entertaining read
I downloaded this as a freebie on kindle out of pure curiousity.
I found most of this book easy to read and follow, and learn't a few things along the way. Read more
I found most of this book easy to read and follow, and learn't a few things along the way. Read more
Published 3 months ago by MungoParkIV
Still clueless
Every time I write a detailed review, my kindle stops. Suffice it to say, not only does the author fail drastically in explaining the concepts, but his proofs are merely formulae... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Reader
For Maths Enthusiasts
There are some interesting nuggets on mathematics in this book but it's not as easy as it's made out to be in the blurb. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Ken
Too complex for me
Although I did "A level" maths (some 40 years ago I admit), I found much of this book to tecknical for me.
Thank goodness I downloaded it for FREE !!
Thank goodness I downloaded it for FREE !!
Published 6 months ago by B. SAVAGE
Book Review
I got this for my Kindle. It is very detailed telling you about patterns and series etc which it develops during the course of the book. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Mr. S. C. Warburton
Fascinating
This book takes the reader on a journey through areas of maths that are not touched on before university- how mathemticians explore the underlying symmetries and structures of a... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Martensgirl
A simple and enjoyable voyage into mathematics
I'm rather suprised at the single comment claiming that the "equations" and "symbols" introduced a few pages in should be confusing - it is the sort of thing that is introduced in... Read more
Published on 9 Jan 2008 by A. L. Stannard
Harder than Expected
Although this books claims to simply explain difficult maths to people with no real experience of maths, i didn't find this to be the case. Read more
Published on 2 May 2007 by Stuart David
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