I didn’t have time to compose an essay this month1, so I can’t offer any of my own writing for you to read (unless this 500-word trifle counts). But I feel I should offer you something, so I decided I’d tell you what I’ve been reading lately in a pop-math vein. Or rather, what I’ve been listening to, since these days I mostly listen to audiobooks.
If your tastes resemble mine, the enjoyment you’ll derive from the audiobooks I recommend will exceed the pleasure you would have taken from the essay that I didn’t write!
My five recommendations are:
Mathematics for Human Flourishing by Francis Su; Infinite Powers by Stephen Strogatz; Significant Figures by Ian Stewart; The Art of More by Michael Brooks; and (currently) Once Upon a Prime by Sarah Hart.
I also liked Measurement by Paul Lockhart, but it’s not quite the same kind of book; the opening is beautifully written and quite accessible, but once Lockhart starts bushwhacking through actual mathematical terrain, the going gets rough. If you didn’t like high school geometry, this probably isn’t the audiobook for you. (Plus, geometry is just about the most visual mathematical subject there is; there’s only so much you can hope to get from an audiobook on geometry, especially one whose words were originally written to be appreciated on the page.)
Listening to Sarah Hart read her own book, I’m reminded of the extra value that’s added by an audiobook narrator who intimately knows the subject matter. In contrast, when I listened to Mathematics for Human Flourishing, there were half a dozen places where I could tell that the narrator wasn’t a mathematician. (For instance, I think he mispronounced the first word of the phrase “arithmetic progression”, putting the emphasis on the second syllable instead of the third. It’s an understandable mistake, but not one that Francis Su would have made if he’d narrated his own audiobook!)
Books I’d like to listen to on audiobook, but haven’t been able to locate, are Bridges to Infinity, by Michael Guillen; Closing the Gap, by Vicky Neale; Nature’s Numbers, by Ian Stewart; and Yearning for the Impossible: The Surprising Truths of Mathematics, by John Stillwell. If you know of any recordings of these books, please let me know!
ENDNOTE
#1. One major distraction was a series of three talks I prepared for a conference entitled “Dimers: Combinatorics, Representation Theory and Physics”. (I also prepared two problem sets and the solutions that went with them.) You can find out more about the conference at https://itsatcuny.org/calendar/dimers2023. At some point the videos of my lectures will be online for those people who want to know more about dimers. If you’re one of those people, you can find the slides from my lectures at https://faculty.uml.edu/jpropp/its1.pdf, https://faculty.uml.edu/jpropp/its2.pdf, and https://faculty.uml.edu/jpropp/its3.pdf. The third of these files contains links to the problem sets and solutions.
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