Review - When Least is Best

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Review - When Least is Best - Paul J. Nahin

This is not a popular science book, and we wouldn't normally review it were it not for the fact it's presented as if it is, and even more so because it is, frankly, highly insulting to popular science.

Paul Nahin makes no bones about it: "Stephen Hawking's famous line about how every equation cuts a book's readership in half doesn't apply here - that's for coffee table books, ones more for displaying than reading." I'm sorry, this is downright unpleasant. A coffee table book is a picture book to be flicked through and leave lying around for show. A good popular science book has excellent writing - it's a real book, not that pale imitation a text book, which a lot of When Least is Best is. And I think Hawking's line is about right for this book too. I'm afraid, Prof. Nahin, least really is best when it comes to equations.

The author admits you need the level of maths held by an undergraduate science student - so that leaves him a big audience. Not.

It's not all bad. Some of the less well known historical snippets are fascinating. For example Descartes' battle with Fermat over Snell's law, resulting in some robust name calling. (Also interesting to note that Snel was Snel, not Snell - Snell's Law is because his latinized name was Snellius, hard to say without sniggering.) However a more typical comment in one of the more legible bits where there isn't a good smattering of equations is where we are told that Archimedes "had tackled a fascinating problem concerning the volumes of the spherical caps cut off by planes passing through spheres of various radii, with the constraint that the caps all have the same surface area." I was so fascinated, I nearly kept awake.

One problem I have with mathematicians is what they do often seems a bit like the Guinness Book of World Records - it feels very arbitrary. I could come up with a new record in an instant. The number of hole punch circles balanced on a fingertip, for example. I am now the world record holder. So what? And the same goes for practically every record in GBoWR. Similarly with maths. For example one of Nahin's "interesting" problems is looking at cutting a piece of string in two and looking at how to cut it to minimize the area of two prescribed shapes, for example a square and a circle. Why string? It might as well be a stick of celery. (Why for the matter it knot theory does the string have no ends. How often do you see a continuous piece of string with no ends? It's loony tunes.)

Perhaps I am being too hard on this book (or maths in general) - I'm sure with the right audience it has them rolling in the aisles. But I suspect it's a very small audience.

Paperback. Also in hardback:

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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