Yup, I’m on a Paulos kick. Sadly, I’m becoming less enamored of his writing. His books are very duplicative. It’s like I’ve paid three times for the same book.
Beyond Numeracy, is Paulos’ follow-up to Innumeracy. It’s a dictionary of mathematics, but not in depth. He covers a lot of the same topics as in Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, but he covers a lot of things that you run into in real life
that he doesn’t cover in those books. For instance, he covers Turing tests and topology. Topics that don’t impact current events a great deal (unlike statistics). Basically, he takes a number of topics in mathematics, arranges them alphabetically, and tries to explain in each entry in simple terms the subject and what makes it interesting. It’s a great intro to math for the non-mathematical. For the most part…
I have two criticisms besides the somewhat repetitive nature (across books) of his information. For the folks who aren’t mathematically inclined, he throws in way too much computation and numbers crunching, despite railing against emphasizing computation. Or perhaps it isn’t strictly computation. But it is mind-numbing exposition of formulas. He’d have done much better to put all that in end-notes. I skimmed those parts.
Second criticism is that for any geek who has taken math past algebra, they will already know most of the topics covered. I skimmed a fair number of topics, e.g., mathematical induction, because I’ve read enough on those topics before. It didn’t help that induction is also a topic where Paulos included too much exposition on formulas.
Still, for some people, this could be a really good way to be exposed to topics in higher mathematics that they’d never see otherwise. If you skim the formulas, there are a lot of cool things to be read and Paulos generally does a good job both with explaining them as well as making them interesting.
Title: Beyond numeracy: ruminations of a numbers man
Author: John Allen Paulos
Imprint / publisher: Vintage
Format: Paperback
Length: 279 p.
Publication date: April 1992
ISBN-10: 0-679-73807-X
Subject: Mathematics
LC classification: QA7.P78 1992
