The display resolution on a domino computer display is terrible (Manchester, 2012). Parker also enlivens his chapters with numerous surprises. Like the extensive writings of legendary Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner this book seeks to make mathematics come alive for an intelligent and curious audience by engaging the reader in a lively informal style, and with irresistible invocations to roll up one’s sleeve and experiment. He is also the Public Engagement in Mathematics Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, and his new book, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension, is an ambitious and delightful addition to the current age’s plethora of high-quality volumes on recreational mathematics-even if most of the material he covers is focused on 2-D and 3-D.
Mathematics popularizer Matt Parker, an Australian based in England, is a self-proclaimed “ standup mathematician” perhaps best known for his numerous contributions to the Numberphile YouTube channel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015 464 pages.
Mathematics is the search for universal, not base-specific, truth.Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension: A Mathematician's Journey through Narcissistic Numbers, Optimal Dating Algorithms, at Least Two Kinds of Infinity, and More, by Matt Parker. Mathematicians do not like things which work only in base-10 it is only because we have ten fingers that we find that system interesting at all. Because mathematicians like the puzzles which work on the pure number rather than the symbolic digit and the system we happen to be writing our numbers down in, there is a sense that, when a puzzle works only in one given base, there is something rather, well, 'secind class' about it.
A maths puzzle is not complete when you merely find an answer, a maths puzzle is complete when you've then tried to generalize it to other situations as well-and minds including Leonard Euler and Lord Kelvin have excelled in mathematics by displaying just this kind of curiosity. Mathematicians constantly want to find solutions and patterns which apply to as many situations as possible, i.e. “This quest to take a problem and see what happens in different situations is called generalizing, and it is this force that drives mathematics forward.
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