Math Nonfiction Review: Shape

Summary: I didn’t even like geometry but I still found this book interesting and approachable.

I only read this book about the real-world applications of geometry because my science book club picked it. I didn’t enjoy geometry in high school or the more advanced concepts from this book that I covered in differential equations and linear algebra. Geometry just felt like memorizing proofs to me, while the upper level classes involved far too much estimating. I’m happy to be able to report back that I enjoyed this book anyway.

What really carried this book for me was the author’s ability to explain things clearly and enthusiastically, often with diagrams and concrete examples. The book is quite accessible. It starts off with the author talking about how he thinks geometry should be taught. He also mentions that he initially wasn’t good at geometry. It’s clear that he wants to students to have fun and understand things, not just memorize them. As someone who’s essentially going to be his student reading this book, that was nice to hear.

Another feature that made this book feel approachable was the order in which concepts were presented. We start out with fairly simple math. There are lots of diagrams. The author does a few proofs, showing the two column way I was taught in school and then showing more fun, intuitive approaches to solving these problems. These were actually really cool! I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the creativity of these approaches to math problems. The book slowly gets into more complex topics by building on earlier chapters. I liked seeing math concepts and the topics they were applied to reappear throughout the book. Repetition and connections help me learn.

The way this book was written was also quite entertaining. The author picked funny examples (how many holes does a straw have?) and important examples (how can math show whether there was gerrymandering?). Mostly this progression worked for me. One chapter, on using eigen values to model disease spread or other processes, lost me a bit. I had to read this twice. Even then, I felt like I understood the concepts, but couldn’t attach them at all to the details of the math. In undergrad, I got the math details, but not the concepts, so I’d really like to have a grasp of both at once! Still, based on my experience, I’d recommend this to anyone who is interested in machine learning/AI, gerrymandering, or modeling disease spread. Even if you didn’t like geometry any more than I did, I think this book could work for you.

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