'1089 and all that'Since the phenomenal success of "The little book of calm", publishers have been falling over themselves to produce "little books" of everything else, presumably in the hope that the essential ingredient was the littleness, rather than the calmness. Although, at 5 inches by 7¼, "1089 and all that" makes a rather big little book, and its content couldn't be further from the banalities of "The little book of calm", there is something of a "little book of mathematics" about it, with its short chapters and personal narrative.
'Mathematics: a Very Short Introduction'One of Oxford University Press's series of "Short Introductions", this book is a rigorous and challenging description, by one of the greatest pure mathematicians alive (Timothy Gowers is Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and a Fields Medal recipient), of what mathematics is. Perhaps too challenging, in fact - on page 23 we are introduced to an axiomatisation of number systems, and things only get tougher. Clearly, as one of a highly intellectual series, the book is intended to stretch its readers' abilities to the utmost.
'The Golden Ratio'Euclid defined what later became known as the Golden Ratio thus:
A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the lesser.
'Elements of Grace' and 'Copernican Notes'During September and October, the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences showed a small exhibition of two suites of photo-etchings with mathematical components by the Canadian artist Catherine M Stewart, who studied both maths and physics in the course of her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto. Elements of Grace is a collection of 12 photo-etchings which combine diagrams from Newton's Principia Mathematica (1729) with photodetails of the human body.
