Matt Parker (Allen Lane)
Writing a popular science book that lures readers into often dense and difficult subjects isn鈥檛 a task for the faint-hearted. And Matt Parker, the best-selling author of Humble Pi and Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension, should know all about that. He is, after all, one of an elite few who make it look effortless. Imagine my surprise, then, at finding his latest book, Love Triangle: The life-changing magic of trigonometry, hard-going.
I am, presumably, the target reader for Parker鈥檚 book: an eager learner, keen to fill gaps in my knowledge (which stops dead at my 18-year-old self鈥檚 studies of advanced mathematics) with witty pop-science books.
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I think the problem is that, for all its strengths, at times the book didn鈥檛 quite offer me the easy catch-up I was hoping for. The introduction raced by with the tale of a speeding driver citing Pythagoras in an Australian court case to explain why they weren鈥檛 to blame (they lost). The first chapter was similarly speedy, involving hot-air balloons and a pig stampede (yes, really), but was sometimes near-impenetrable.
Parker鈥檚 frenetic writing style is like a friendly adult firing out facts to their particularly curious 8-year-old charge. It is chummy, engaging and full of exclamation marks! At times, it is very funny 鈥� as you would expect from someone billed as a stand-up mathematician.
But facts flew past me at quite a pace, and statements were made without explanation, such that I wanted to reach into the pages and beg Parker to stop so I could ask questions (of which I had plenty).
For example, we learn that the wake behind a duck, no matter its size, always forms an angle of 39 degrees, and that when a doodlebug digs sand traps to catch ants, it builds walls at 34 degrees. The duck story 鈥渢ells us something about the way waves move in water鈥�, writes Parker, while that 34 degrees tells us something about the nature of sand.
But to find out what exactly, we have to wait for the conclusion 270-plus pages later, when we are fobbed off and told that Parker has run out of space to explain it all.
About halfway through the book, after another chapter where I half understood most of what I read, and was completely lost for about 10 per cent of it, I began to wonder whether I was the problem. Was this book just too hard for me?
It is something that I imagine Parker, a former primary school maths teacher in Australia, wouldn鈥檛 have wanted his reader to feel. But it is a valid question. In my defence, I lapped up Alex Bellos鈥檚 Alex鈥檚 Adventures in Numberland when it was published in 2010, and have since enjoyed other popular mathematics books, such as Michael Brooks鈥檚 The Maths That Made Us.
Maybe Love Triangle is slightly too advanced for those trying to dredge up half-remembered lessons from over 20 years ago. It is a shame because there are many great nuggets in the book.
For example, I was wowed when I read that 3D printers represent the items they create in triangles. And I laughed mightily when Parker got a friend to try to recreate the soccer ball seen on UK road signs to indicate a nearby football stadium 鈥� it turns out to be geometrically impossible to make without making some very strange fixes.
So there are very good reasons to persevere with this book: when it clicks, it is glorious. It is clear from reading Love Triangle鈥榮 352 pages that Parker knows his stuff. I did pick up some information, and generally found the book interesting and sometimes fascinating.
Regretfully, though, I don鈥檛 think I understood trigonometry anything like as much as Parker might have liked. And that is a shame.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
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