Shape : the hidden geometry of information, biology, strategy, democracy, and everything else
Publication Information
New York : Penguin Press, 2021.
Physical Description
465 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
Summary
"How should a democracy choose its representatives? How can you stop a pandemic from sweeping the world? How do computers learn to play GO, and why is learning Go so much easier for them than learning to read a sentence? Can ancient Greek proportions predict the stock market? (Sorry, no.) What should your kids learn in school if they really want to learn to think? All these are questions about geometry. For real. If you're like most people, geometry is a sterile and dimly remembered exercise you gladly left behind in the dust of ninth grade, along with your braces and active romantic interest in pop singers. If you recall any of it, it's plodding through a series of minuscule steps only to prove some fact about triangles that was obvious to you in the first place. That's not geometry. Okay, it is geometry, but only a tiny part, which has as much to do with geometry in all its flush modern richness as conjugating a verb has to do with a great novel. Shape reveals the geometry underneath some of the most important scientific, political, and philosophical problems we face. Geometry asks: Where are things? Which things are near each other? How can you get from one thing to another thing? These are important questions. The word 'geometry' comes from the Greek for 'measuring the world.' If anything, that's an undersell. Geometry doesn't just measure the world--it explains it. Shape shows us how"--Dust jacket.
Contents
- Where things are and what they look like
- "I vote for Euclid"
- How many holes does a straw have?
- Giving the same name to different things
- A fragment of the sphinx
- "His style was invincibility"
- The mysterious power of trial and error
- Artificial Intelligence as mountaineering
- You are your own negative-first cousin, and other maps
- Three years of Sundays
- What happened today will happen tomorrow
- The terrible law of increase
- The smoke in the leaf
- A rumple in space
- How math broke democracy (and might still save it)
- I prove a theorem and the house expands.