Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

Great idea, but disappointing

Customer Rating:

Granted I'm only about halfway through the book, but there's a reason for that. The idea, as presented by the NYT book review, is good: relate the math you learned in school, from memorized formulas to more difficult abstractions, to its much more interesting real-life applications, all while illustrating how those memorized relationships and hard-to-grasp concepts underpin so much of what you already take to be fact without attributing the reasons to mathematical relationships. But the prose is just not that enjoyable to me. Perhaps it will improve as I get more into the author's rhythm, but this isn't what I was looking for.

Interesting, Yes, But Way Over My Head

Customer Rating:

I have always enjoyed math and use numbers constantly in making illustrations about everyday events. I won't tell you not to try this book as much of the material is fascinating! However, in spite of my mathematical background, I found that most of the material was too abstract for my feeble mind. I had trouble comprehending some of the concepts that were presented as being fairly simple. Hopefully, you are smarter than I am and will enjoy this book. If you struggle with numbers to begin with, I would suggest something more basic.