★★★☆☆ Disappointed me, maybe not you

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

Steven Strogatz

I have the highest opinion of Steven H. Strogatz, and I generally enjoy pop math books. (For instance, see my reviews of Ben Orlin's books.) But somehow The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity disappointed me. In it Strogatz trots out the classics. I've seen all this before, and mostly I've seen it done better. For instance, there was a chapter on Mobius strips. We did this in my grade school math classes, and Strogatz offered no new insights.

He also had a chapter on infinities, ending with the classic Cantor diagonal theorem. Cantor's Diagonal Theorem regularly makes mathematician's lists of best theorems of all-time. (Yes, mathematicians make such lists. See, for instance, this one, which has it at number 22.) It is a beautiful proof of a startling and deeply weird conclusion. If you can read Cantor's Diagonal Theorem without feeling weirded out, you haven't understood it. I am quite sure that Strogatz appreciates this. Yet he entirely fails to convey that brilliant strangeness in The Joy of X.

My problem, probably, is that I've been reading things like this all my life. In 1967 my Aunt Althea gave me a subscription to Scientific American. A regular feature was Martin Gardner's monthly recreational mathematics article Mathematical Games. These were brilliant, and, I am sorry to say, utterly spoiled me for The Joy of X. You might say, "That's *YOUR* problem," and you might be right. Still, the upshot is that I was disappointed by The Joy of X.

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