Popular Science Review - Introducing Mathematics

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Review - Introducing Mathematics - Ziauddin Sardar, Jerry Ravetz & Borin Van Loon

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books - they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing ... series (about 80 books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as ... for Beginners, puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point.

Does it work in practice? In this case it's a mixed bag. The illustrations are rather less mind boggling than in many of the series relying a lot on what look like old magazine illustrations - they are wonderful, but perhaps not quite as good at shocking the illustration into your brain as the weird and wonderful images these books usually contain.

The maths itself is fine, though there are a few worrying omissions, uncomfortable changes of speed and perhaps a rather excessive political correctness. For example, talking about powers, it doesn't bother to explain how multiplying two powered numbers together, you add the powers. (e.g. 10⁵ x 10³ = 10⁸ because 5+3=8). If we had been told that it would make a lot more sense of the negative powers, and particular of something to the power zero (e.g. 10⁰=1), the explanation for which in the book is absolutely feeble.

Changes of speed are evidenced in the way it shoots into some stuff with very little explanation (tedious pages of trigonometry, for example), the spends ages over a triviality. And the political correctness is clear in the excessive attempts to allocate priority wherever possible to a non-Western source. E.g. the Jain idea that there are three types of infinity "near infinite, truly infinite and infinitely infinite" receives the comment "European mathematics did not scale those heights until just a century ago, in the work of Cantor." Apart from the fact that Cantor was dealing with proofs on the nature of infinite sets, not vague woffly statements that could mean almost anything, this overlooks the fact that Galileo had already made much more specific comments on different infinity well before Cantor was around.

Don't take it that this book's all bad. As it says on the cover, there just isn't another book around that can precis a subject the way this does, but it just could have done the job better.

*Marmite? If you are puzzled by this assessment, you probably aren't from the UK. Marmite is a yeast-based product (originally derived from beer production waste) that is spread on bread/toast. It's something people either love or hate, so much so that the company has run very successful TV ad campaigns showing people absolutely hating the stuff...

Only in paperback.

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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