The Magic of Math: Solving for X and Figuring Out Why (2015)

Benjamin, Arthur. The Magic of Math: Solving for X and Figuring Out Why. Basic Books, 2015.

For a publisher (Basic Books) who brought out Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid in 1979, I will read just about anything. And if the book purports to make math simple and fun I am all the more for it. Despite achieving a bachelor's degree in computer science, which forced me to endure three levels of calculus, linear algebra, statistics, and so on, I must confess that I've always had a love-hate relationship with math. It doesn't come as easily to me as reading and writing, so I shy away from it (some would call this playing to my strengths). Yet whenever someone, like the aforementioned Hofstadter, shows me some mathematical splendor I cannot help but be enlivened and interested in learning more. Luckily, Arthur Benjamin could rightly be called America's math teacher in the way Stanley Fish is America's English teacher. His passion for math and his profession as a teacher shine on every page. As the playful subtitle implies, the text reads like something written by that uncle who has an endless store of magic tricks and puns so awful you cannot help but laugh. In the first chapter, Benjamin employs amusing anecdotes and easy-to-follow examples to show how we can discover patterns in the particular to derive algorithms for the general. And he concludes the volume with a chapter on the endlessly-fascinating (see what I did there?) topic of infinity.