Friday, October 4, 2019

A World Full of Math

Woo, Eddie.  Ir's A Numberful World: How Math is Hiding Everywhere...from the Crown of a Tree
          to the Sound of a Sine Wave.  New York: The Experiment, 2019.
         ISBN: 978-1-61519-612-8

Were you born a mathematician?  Do you like math?  Or did you like math and then got frustrated with it?  Does Algebra or Calculus strike dread in your soul? Or maybe you get lost in the variables of life and just need to know what is going on.  Eddie Woo strives to answer at least some of these questions in It's A Numberful Life.

Eddie Woo confesses in the Prologue that he had little joy in math, but then he began training as a mathematics teacher when he turned 19.  He had learned a secret - "Math is all around us."  In 26 short chapters, he takes the readers on a whirlwind tour of the world beginning with babies as mathematicians, then going up into the sky to question why rainbows are circles, diving into sound and music with wave cycles, comparing veins in your body with lightening, delving into cryptography, killer butterflies, and card tricks to astonish your friends, explaining why there are so many conspiracy theories, why electronic devices lie about how long they will last, and several other topics!  He provides plenty of visual examples to make the processing and absorption of information easier and much more fun.  And that is the key to this book.  Eddie Woo had fun writing this book and he wants the reader to have fun reading it!

So if you are looking for a quick reading, non-fiction book that may blow your mind and help you understand math, pick up It's A Numberful World and enjoy!