Won’t have time to do adequate blurbs (let alone full reviews) of all the books I’m reading now but will mention just a few of those I’m enjoying most, for a general audience.
Volume I last finished was Ian Stewart’s “Significant Figures,” his new compendium of biographical sketches of a couple dozen famous mathematicians — the writing is not as scintillating as some of Stewart’s other offerings, but adequate, especially if you’re looking for succinct profiles of mathematicians from ancient through William Thurston. The first half of the bios (and they’re in chronological order), had an almost cut-and-paste feel to it (to me), while the writing for the more modern half was more interesting/engaging.
Oddly, after finishing the new Stewart volume I stumbled upon his much older “The Problems of Mathematics” (at a garage sale) which is a wonderful read and overview of mathematics (a bit dated in parts), and highly recommendable.
And 3 more current books in my queue at the moment:
“Ten Great Ideas About Chance” — have barely started it, but coming from Persi Diaconis and Brian Skyrms looks quite good, though I’m tiring a bit of the many popular treatments of chance/probability/statistics in the last 3 years. Still, an important topic, and leafing through it, the volume does appear to have a somewhat fresh take and organization.
“The Best Writing In Mathematics 2017” — Micea Pitici’s latest entry in his ongoing series (the 2016 edition also came out earlier this year, so two in one year!). The volume is, as usual, a very wide-ranging collection of writings/topics from 2016, as Pitici shows again how “panoramic” and “versatile” mathematics really is. Some of your favorite popular math writers from the internet are included, and it is handsomely produced by Princeton University Press. I couldn’t detect a theme or prevalence of topics in this year’s edition, just the usual disjointed variety that Pitici brings together.
He mentions at the end that he has switched his own career focus over to library science now, from mathematics, and I’m not clear if that will affect his production of this volume in the future (though I suspect not).
“A Most Elegant Equation” by David Stipp — How could you go wrong writing about everybody’s favorite equation in mathematics, Leonhard Euler’s e^(iπ)+1=0. Even when the writing is a bit dry or stodgy the topic is so inherently interesting as to pull you along.
These are all books that will make my recommended list for end-of-year Holiday shopping, but several other books of a more specialized nature have crossed my desk the last few months, and I’ll probably leave them un-noted.
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