Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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This is bad math. Egregiously bad math.

A Slice of Pi by Liz Strachan

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BINGO – Font (though truthfully, you should not go to this book for math information) Let me just start by just saying that this book is not a good book for learning or even remembering anything related to math. Overall, this book feels more like a chance for author Liz Strachan to reflect on her 36 years of mathematics education experience and boast about much her students just absolutely loved math and how easy math was for all of her students. This book is 161 […]

Pick up a physical slice of humble pi and learn some math

Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker

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Math is everywhere. It is a part of everything we do now. Math developed the roads and bridges we drive on. Math created the buildings we work in (or used to work in, pre-pandemic). Math forms all the technology we use without a second thought. But what happens when the math goes wrong? When someone fudges the numbers or uses the wrong unit? Or when data get deleted? Sometimes what happens is a mild inconvenience that is easily rectified but other times, the results are […]

Paternoster Qui Est inFinitum

Beyond Infinity by Eugenia Cheng

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Bingo Book Review 19: White Whale I think it was about 3 years ago when I read How to Bake π, mostly liked it, and went out to get the author’s subsequent book Beyond Infinity. I started it, got bored after about a chapter, and it’s been sitting on my coffee table since then. I’ve promised myself every now and again that I’m going to finish off the 3-4 books that I’ve started at some point and not finished, so this time it was Beyond […]

In which A Square contemplates the universe

Flatland by Edwin Abbott

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Flatland is broken up into two parts. In the first A Square explains to the reader his universe which is called Flatland, a two dimensional world. There are only two dimensions in Flatland: one that runs North to South and one that run West to East. All women are Lines and there is a separate caste system based around the number of sides one has. In such system, the lowest caste are isosceles triangles, for how can one be worthy of respect if they are […]

Q: What did the quater say to the penny?

Spend It! (Moneybunny) by Cinders McLeod

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Spend It! is one in a series of books for kids learning about money.  Along with Earn It! and Save It! (and possibly a future title Give It!) the reader finds out that money is not as straight forward as one might think. Cinders McLeod, in this book, talks about understanding your choices when it comes to money. Our bunny hero, Sonny, has three carrots, therefore, that means he can buy three things, right? Wrong! As he quickly learns. (Though you got to love that […]

Pie to Pi but a Little Underbaked

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How to Bake Pi uses analogies to cooking and baking (and lots of other everyday things) to explain some fairly advanced mathematical concepts. These work nicely, especially for someone like me who hasn’t done anything beyond calculus 2, and that over 10 years ago. The invention of an olive oil plum cake recipe for example becomes a way of explaining generalization (how can something be called a ‘cake’ if it is not completely really a cake) and the mathematical practice of proof by contradiction (proving something […]



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