by Administrator
9. August 2011 21:17
Hi all
I have previously written part 1 of a book review at http://blogs.eliasen.dk/Personal/post/2011/07/10/100-Essential-things-you-didn’t-know-you-didn’t-know-part-I.aspx.
I have now finished the book and thought I’d write my thoughts about the book here.
First of all, I am not sure the 100 things are actually essential… some of them are more “Nice to know” than “Need to know”, but hey, that’s subjective, right?
Anyway, some of the things I didn’t know I didn’t know require some more-than-basic math skills to understand, which at times was rather hard to follow; I mean… for a book that is supposed to be bedtime reading, I think it requires too much. Had it been a book where you are supposed to sit and use time to study calculations, that would have been fine.
Out of the 100 things, I found these to be the most interesting;
- Why pylons consists of triangles
- Why it is easier to walk on a tightrope using a long pole with heavy buckets at the ends
- Why Barbados had to score an own goal against Grenada to move on in a tournament
- Some strategies for dividing something equally
- Why no one has ever travelled in time
- A new proof of Pythagoras’s theorem
- How Calculus once saved the life of a mathematician
- A lot of information about how to cut a diamond
- There are no uninteresting numbers
- Some different ways to score sports events that are more or less silly
- Why A4/A3/A2 and so on paper formats are SO much cleverer than the US letter format and so on
It’s been a good read, but without some interest in mathematics and physics, you won’t like it.
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eliasen
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