The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity

by Steven H. Strogatz

math always involves both invention and discovery: we invent the concepts but discover their consequences.

folks do say, especially here in Ithaca, New York,

Huh. Now at Cornell. He used to be at MIT.

(Images like this abound in a terrific book called Visual Group Theory, by Nathan Carter. It’s one of the best introductions to group theory—or to any branch of higher math—I’ve ever read.)

Vi Hart was so frustrated by her boring math courses in high school that she began doodling in class, sketching snakes and trees and infinite chains of shrinking elephants, instead of listening to the teacher droning on. Vi, who calls herself a “full-time recreational mathemusician,” has posted some of her doodles on YouTube. They’ve now been watched hundreds of thousands of times, and in the case of the elephants, more than a million. She, and her videos, are breathtakingly original.

And as for my fantastically patient wife, Carole, who slogged through the first n drafts of each chapter and thereby learned the true meaning of the expression “as n tends to infinity,”

About the Author STEVEN STROGATZ is the Schurman Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. A renowned teacher and one of the world’s most highly cited mathematicians, he has been a frequent guest on National Public Radio’s Radiolab. He is the author of Sync and The Calculus of Friendship, and the recipient of a lifetime achievement award for math communication. He also wrote a popular New York Times online column, “The Elements of Math,” which formed the basis for this book.