by Tangey Penny
Richard Feynman was an American physicist who received a Nobel prize in 1965. Catherine is a bright school girl who especially enjoys her Maths and Science classes. Her father tells her about Richard Feynman, and gives her a poster. She starts to read anecdotes about his life in a book he published called Surely Your Joking Mr Feynman.
Catherine’s life becomes increasingly complex as she tries to sort out a crush on a boy, where she fits in with the groups at school, dealing with a very bright and confident boy who arrives at the school, and ultimately with her parents marriage problems. She decides to put her thoughts into words by writing to Feynman, even though he is dead. As she reads more of the book about him she finds that even her hero has aspects of his life she cannot admire.
This is a charming and thoughtful book that touches on a number of real situations for young people, and from the point of view of a young high achiever. It would be most suited to younger high school students but is a thought provoking and enjoyable read for older students. The book consists entirely of letters to Feynman, but the overall storytelling still works well.
I must confess that I had similar mixed reactions to the Feynman book, so I found this book especially engaging. While some things get sorted out in Catherine’s life, we leave her contemplating the great sadness in the life of one of her friends, so the book balances hope with an understanding of difficulties that deeply impact some teenagers.
By Paul Hoffman
This is a haunting and fascinating biography of Paul Erdös. He was a Hungarian mathematician with an incredible output... he was interested in almost nothing else but mathematics. He moved from place to place staying with other mathematicians, payed little attention to money matters, and constantly proposed new problems to solve. He was so prolific in publishing papers (often with other authors) that there is an in-joke in Mathematics based on what is called your “Erdös number”. If you published with Erdös you get a status number of “1”. If you published with someone who published with Erdös you get a status number of “2” and so on.
Despite a number of idiosyncrasies, he was generous with his ideas and money, and was very kind to children (who he called “epsilons”). While this book does try to introduce the reader to some of his interests, including number theory and probability, it is not overloaded with technical matters. Erdös died in 1996 having published more papers than any other mathematician. This book is a warm hearted introduction to someone who lived life with a single focus, and “outsider” who contributed richly to his field and who invited collaboration with his peers.
It is a suitable read for Senior School and above. Indeed there is nothing in it to concern younger readers, except for his use (or abuse) of tablets later in his life to stay awake as much as possible (to do more Mathematics).
by Douglas R. Hofstadter
This weighty book was awarded a Pulizer Prize for non-fiction. It is a book that can be read in many ways. The author set out to give a layperson’s account of a very complex (and astonishingly powerful) theorem of the mathematician Gödel. He ended up writing a book that touches on programming, the theory of consciousness, self reference and ‘strange loops’ in the works of Bach, Escher and other artists. He uses an interconnected series of essays that all build towards his central idea. He also includes very entertaining discussions between characters like Achilles, an anteater, and a tortoise. If reading it cover to cover is too much of a challenge it can be treated as a book to dip into for intriguing and fascinating ideas. Unlike many other books of theory and philosophy it is packed with illustrations, graphics and graphical curios.
I commend this book to those who are curious, to those who are fascinated by philosophy and ideas, and for those who are attracted by things like “self referential sentences”... my favourite being “this sentence no verb”.
“How anything can be predicted”
by Ian Ayres
I have a nephew working on a PhD in data mining. This book has been a great help in my desperate attempts to at least have a clue about his speciality. It is written for the general reader, and is full of interesting stories about what is being done with large scale data sets. The world’s data warehouses are currently groaning with data picked up from our daily transactions. Storage is being discussed in terms you may not even have heard of... not gigabytes or terabytes but petabytes and exabytes.
Why do we need to know about this? Apart from curiosity (and those of us with data mining nephews), we are all aware of the astounding rise to prominence of the Google company. The world of massive data accumulation and “mining” is Google’s world. How is it possible that Google maps now shows constantly updated traffic density on Sydney’s roads... and why do they give this away free? One answer at least is that data is the new currency. Google gives away useful information to get more and more people using their services, thus providing more and more data for other uses.
I found this a most engaging read from the opening story about Aorly Ashenfelter who shocked wine connoisseurs by using data sets to predict the dollar value of particular vintages. The book is worth a solid end-to-end read but you can equally well dip into it randomly for a peek at this new world of digital wonder and ethical challenges.
