Underwood DudleyCritiques

I have not yet finished this book, but am careening (and laughing) through it -- Mathematical Cranks is one of the funnier books I have read in a looooong time. If you are a mathematics dork (a term of praise and endearment, I contend), and also find great entertainment in the human comedy -- in particular 'why people believe weird things' -- you will enjoy the living daylights out of this book.

Dudley is a fine writer with a finely-honed sense of humor. I want to try out some of his more strictly mathematical texts.

First class!

This book is full of little and bright gems for the mathematically inclined. It includes original pieces from many mathematicians and historians of mathematics but the book is not very technical and heavy on math. In the same book you can find a very interesting discussion that took place in UK parliament which is about defending a high level of math in UK schools (I admired the level of sophistication and argumentation of Mr. Tony McWalter in his 'Defense of Quadratic Equations'), a valuable piece on the economics of rare mathematics books, the description of calculus in the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768-1771) where the author talks about fluxions and fluents (instead of derivatives and continuous functions) and lots of other interesting pieces.

My favorite chapters are by Joseph A. Gallian (in which he uses applied math to hack personal info-to-license plate numbering schemes), Richard Guy (in which he defends the political rights for the majority of triangles, the obtuse ones! by showing that the probability of a random triangle being obtuse is a little bit higher than you intuitively expected) and Steven B. Smith (in which he provides an account of calculating prodigies, one of them having worked at CERN until 1960s as a human computer!).