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Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Absolutely Everything

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Understanding shapes is a foundational math skill as well as an important visual identification skill.

Mathematics is not my forte. It was a problem for me in school and for a long time, I was convinced that I just wasn't a math person. Of course, when I grew older, a lot older, some really smart mathematicians online tried to convince me that anyone can become good at math. Not excellent or exceptional, but good is possible. As a humanities major, however, I think I approach the whole problem the wrong way because instead of actually trying to do some maths (Who has time for that?), I prefer to read books about it. "Shape" is one such book.

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Collaborative Innovation Center of Technology and Equipment for Biological Diagnosis and Therapy in Universities of Shandong, Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Research (IAIR), University of Jinan, Jinan 250022, P. R. China

The sections on gerrymandering are excellent. I learned a lot, and Ellenberg did a fantastic job explaining why proportional representation wasn't the ideal metric for dividing up districts and why random walks through the space of possible congressional districts can be a powerful tool. The book is supposedly about geometry, although I found the relation sometimes tangential. Anyway, it was engaging and mind-opening. If you'd like to know about many applications of mathematics in real life (with a hint of geometry), this book can be a good choice.Did you know Einstein played violin on the street for extra cash? Or that Gauss was often only a few steps ahead of his debts? Or that Wordsworth (the poet) and Lincoln (the politician) were excellent mathematicians? Can you even imagine the last president read Euclid for fun!? Oh and my favorite bit -- Karl Pearson, the correlations guy, apparently looked like a Greek God. He also taught his class the law of large numbers by throwing 10,000 pennies on the floor and making students count the heads. I remember the dreary day I was taught that theorem. Yikes. Maybe this is how we should teach math! I loved Jordan Ellenberg's earlier book, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, and it was a hard act to follow. But not for Ellenberg, as this book is also great. While the title, "Shape" implies that this book is about geometry--and it is--it is also about so much more. This book shows how mathematics is applicable to just about everything under the sun. And Ellenberg manages to make it all so fascinating! The sheer depth at which he covers an incredibly diverse range of topics is staggering. This is the type of book that I love! Ellenberg is a professor of mathematics, so he certainly knows what he is talking about! The Read Manchester campaign is run in partnership by Manchester City Council and the National Literacy Trust, and promotes reading for enjoyment through a programme of activities and events. Next, I did the cover for the book birthday cake. With some dark pink icing (using the round tip), I piped a long line all around the book for the cover. I also piped in the tiny triangle piece cut out earlier. People often complain that no one likes facts and numbers and reason and science anymore, but as someone who talks about those things in public, I can tell you that’s not true. People love numbers, and are impressed by them, sometimes more than they should be. An argument dressed up in math carries with it a certain authority. If you’re the one who outfitted it that way, you have a special responsibility to get it right.

This book has many excellent pieces but they are poorly linked together and surrounded by bloat. In my opinion, it could be polished into another masterpiece (like his previous book "How Not to be Wrong") if the theme was more concrete and topics were more carefully strung together. A little girl finds different shapes around the city including a square, rectangle, triangle, circle, oval, diamond, and star. Use this book to inspire your own environmental shape hunt. Gorgeous watercolor and collage illustrations. As children begin to learn, you can look for shapes in your environment. Talk about what you notice. Then, compare how objects are the same or different. Ellenberg can ramble; there are a few times I felt the book was turning into a primer on COVID-19 modelling (which isn't bad, but didn't feel like the book I started reading). At times, the emphasis on geometry works (especially when discussing huge multi-dimensional spaces), but sometimes I felt he was pushing too hard to make something geometrical (e.g., the SIR model for epidemics). Overall, the theme is there to give Ellenberg a focus, but it's not carried out strongly.The book is loosely related by the theme of geometry. It isn't only about plane geometry, though, and has fun explorations of topology, random walks (the mathematical kind), neural networks via gradient descent, networks/graph theory, and even a chapter on the math of gerrymandering. That was not an all-comprehensive list, either.

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