Here’s Looking at Euclid

Book Review : Here’s Looking at Euclid

Author : Alex Bellos

My Rating : 4 out of 5 stars

The complete title of the book is “Here’s Looking at Euclid : A surprising excursion through the astonishing world of math”.

On the back cover of the book, there is a large paragraph praising this book, written by none other than Martin Gardner. That caught my attention. There is also a chapter in the book related to toys and puzzles based on mathematics, in which the author describes his meeting with Martin Gardner, and about his influence on recreational mathematics. This book seems to be in the same tradition that Gardener was instrumental in popularizing. Blending Math, History, Mind bending puzzles, and much more in an entertaining package.

This book too is fun to read, although it starts slow. The initial chapters were a bit of a drag for me. I was also irritated by the constant reference of Amazonian native tribes as “Indians”. This is not about political correctness, it’s just flat out wrong. Especially for someone who has taken the trouble to travel to India to personally research about ancient Hindu mathematics. Even setting that aside, it took a few chapters for the book to pick up speed for me.

Luckily, as the book progressed, it became a lot more entertaining and informative. Each chapter has a theme. Although sometimes there are references to earlier chapters, I don’t think it needs to be run sequentially. It can be thought of as a collection of essays, and can be read in any order.

Each chapter is about a different area of mathematics. Of course, there is no hope to even touch upon all the areas. These topics are what the author has chosen to show that Mathematics is accessible, fun and inspiring. Some of the topics of the chapters are so extensive that entire books of recreational math have been written about them. For example, see my previous reviews about books on topics such as the “non-Euclidean geometry” or “probability”. In spite of the limitation of condensing the material to one chapter, the author has succeeded in giving a thorough introduction to the history and ideas involved, and kept in a fun to read.

The last chapter, unconvincingly bundles non-Euclidean Geometry and Cantor’s theory of infinity together. It’s still a good chapter, but I would have preferred more detailed chapter on each. Some of the middle chapters are a breeze to read. The information about Sudoku, or the Bell Curve was brilliantly presented.

Most people who like reading books on Math will like this book as well. If you haven’t read a lot of books on Math, this is a nice place to start. Especially if you have been intimidated by high school math, you should definitely try this one, as there are many facets of Math that are just delightful and everyone deserves to be delighted by Math.