corollary

Listening to:

Blossom Dearie, ’Deed I do.

Just read:

Ian Stewart, Flatterland: like Flatland, only more so.

This is a popular mathematics book, written by a well-known mathematician. I’ve read another book of his, called Nature’s numbers, which I thought was pretty good. Flatterland is very different. It’s an enjoyable and informative read, I hasten to add, but it’s written in a very jokey way that is quite surprising. In many ways, it feels a bit like Alice in Wonderland. It’s full of puns and word-play. Most of these elicit smiles, but it’s not exactly Wodehouse. For example, the Alice character, called Victoria Line, meets the Space Girls, as well as a formidable character called the Hawk King.

This badinage is all very well, but what of the real content? Just as the 19th century Flatland was designed to introduce the ideas of the possibility of fourth spatial dimensions, this book introduces some modern maths relating to the nature of ‘worlds’ of different dimensions. Thus, projective planes (projective plains, dominated by parallel lions, which do meet at the horizon), shapes with fractional dimension, hyperbolic geometry, error correction with Hamming codes, and relevant bits of modern cosmology: special and general relativity, and bits and bobs about superstring theory.

That’s quite a lot really, but Stewart marshals it well enough so that it flies past in a reasonably engaging way. I did feel that I'd been given an impression of a whole slew of interesting sounding maths. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but feel a little frustrated by the book, in a way that didn't happen with The eternal frontier. The problem is that I didn’t finish feeling that I really understood the material. I appreciate that modern quantum physics requires a lot of high-powered maths that would take a long time to acquire, but I do think that I might cope with the real definitions underlying topology or the hyperbolic plane. The closest we get to an equation is in the description of how the Mandelbrot set is defined.

Something of a mixed verdict then.

Eoin Colfer, Artemis Fowl.

This is an enjoyable children’s book. It features a 12-year old anti-hero, called Artemis Fowl, and a fairy member of the Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance squad, Holly Short. (She's a LEPrecon member, geddit?) Artemis Fowl is a juvenile criminal master-mind, and his plot is to steal some fairy gold. The problem is that the fairies are armed, and dangerous. The book is the story of the their encounter, and how it is resolved. It features lots of clichés among the characters, but slightly twisted to amusing effect, high-excitement encounters (including a particularly cool infiltration by an explosively farting dwarf), and some very amusing scenes and dialogue. It's also neat to be reading something from Ireland.

You can read extracts of this, and its sequels, here.

To read next:

Patrick O’Brian, The reverse of the medal.