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Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions |  | Author: Brian Hayes
Publisher: Hill and Wang
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Seller: athena_books
Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 324967
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.4 x 1
ISBN: 0809052172
Dewey Decimal Number: 530
EAN: 9780809052172
ASIN: 0809052172
Publication Date: April 14, 2009
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Product Description
Brian Hayes is one of the most accomplished essayists active today—a claim supported not only by his prolific and continuing high-quality output but also by such honors as the National Magazine Award for his commemorative Y2K essay titled “Clock of Ages,” published in the November/December 1999 issue of The Sciences magazine. (The also-rans that year included Tom Wolfe, Verlyn Klinkenborg, and Oliver Sacks.) Hayes’s work in this genre has also appeared in such anthologies as The Best American Magazine Writing, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and The Norton Reader. Here he offers us a selection of his most memorable and accessible pieces—including “Clock of Ages”—embellishing them with an overall, scene-setting preface, reconfigured illustrations, and a refreshingly self-critical “Afterthoughts” section appended to each essay. Brian Hayes writes the “Computing Science” column for American Scientist magazine, where he is a former editor in chief. His previous book, Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape, was published in 2005. Brian Hayes is one of the most accomplished essayists writing today—a claim supported not only by his prolific and continuing high-quality output but also by such honors as the National Magazine Award for his commemorative Y2K essay titled "Clock of Ages," published in the November/December 1999 issue of The Sciences magazine. Hayes’s work in this genre has also appeared in such anthologies as The Best American Magazine Writing, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and The Norton Reader.
Hayes uses computing and mathematics to explore everything from the deadly serious (war and peace) to the utterly frivolous (theories on mattress flipping) in Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions, the first collection of his work. He offers a selection of twelve of his most memorable and engaging pieces to date, including "Clock of Ages." The essays are embellished with an overall, scene-setting preface, reconfigured illustrations, and a refreshingly self-critical "Afterthoughts" section appended to each piece. "Brian Hayes, since 1993 the 'Computing Science' columnist for American Scientist magazine, is an unrepentant numbers nut. His second book (following 2005's Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape) complies and updates approximately a decade's worth of his most significant articles, creating an elegant and high-minded overview of how rigorous mathematical laws intersect with and govern our daily lives."—Mike Newirth, Time Out Chicago
"He's a graceful writer. And if you love numbers, grids and graphs, you'll love this book."—Sara Lippincott, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Stimulating . . . Brian Hayes discusses how he got caught up in figuring out how to precisely locate the Continental Divide. He began pondering the issue in Idaho during a road trip, and, as he puts it, he was unusually compelled to work it out in his head: 'For a week or so I had no choice but to think about the problem' . . . Hayes isn't a mathematician, which is often to his credit: His best pieces have a journalistic looseness that dovetails nicely with the academic rigor he brings to the subject matter. Indeed, the opening essay, on the immense (and immensely complex) clock at Strasbourg Cathedral, is a masterpiece of science writing. Hayes stands in awe of the clock's capabilities—the 160-plus years-old timepiece has an error rate of 'less than a second per century' and can accurately account for leap years, Easter and other temporal changes. But he's also willing to provide some detail on how the clock literally ticks, and insert some insightful riffing on the notion of clocks that last for millennia. ('To assume that the values of our own age embody eternal verities and virtues is foolish and arrogant,' he writes.) Like any science writer who successfully writes for the layperson, Hayes has an ear for the poetic. Discussing a book on the 'mathematics of armed conflict' by Lewis Fry Richardson, Hayes smartly calls out a lovely two-word sentence about how difficult it is to locate the start- and endpoints of wars: 'Thinginess fails' . . . Though Hayes tries to bring a casual feel to such subjects as partitioning (breaking up numbers into equal subsets) and base-three counting, he's in deep woods. 'You might stumble onto the sequence 0102010, which is square free but cannot be extended without creating a square,' he writes, before enthusing, 'Try it!' Must I? Better this, though, than the many lesser inheritors of The Tipping Point and Freakonomics, writers who figure that writing on science is largely a matter of finding a provocative study and asserting wide-reaching applications from it. While Hayes is an assured and genial guide through the often thorny wilds of computation and mathematics, he never promises more than he can deliver. When discussing the complexities of wealth-distribution models, he claims no fix for economic injustice; there and elsewhere, he's content to simply present the terms of discussion and argue that the numbers and graphs at his command are beautiful, playful things. Quite often, he's right."—Mark Athitakis, The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
"It is ever so reassuring to discover that scientific, indeed mathematical, scholarship and essay writing is alive and well. Brian Hayes, who has written many columns for The Sciences magazine, here gives his past and future readers a real treat. With a deft hand at explanation and with feet firmly on the ground of practicality, the author is able to take ordinary mundane phenomena and bring them to life mathematically. The first essay points out difficulties in making accurate clocks which predict dates of Easter as well as days, hours, minutes and seconds, not to say sun and moon rising and setting: a great deal lies behind the construction of practical gear trains for such purposes, a theme taken up again later. Subsequent essays contemplate randomness, genetic codes, studies of patterns in the outbreaks of conflict, how to locate the (or a) continental divide, hard problems (NP completeness), problems with choosing names for new objects, efficiency of calculation in various bases, and whether there are many or there is only one electron! The final essay, from which the book takes its title, provides a welcome explanation to the many perplexed purchasers of mattresses that carry instructions to turn them over regularly so as not to develop lumps and hollows without clear indication of how. Highly recommended and an excellent present for anyone who is curious about the world in which they live, and appreciative of how true scholarship goes well beyond information retrieval to make surprising but significant and meaningful connections."—John H. Mason, Mathematical Reviews
“Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions is a marvelous collection of thought-provoking essays that both inform and entertain. You'll be amazed by the things you'll discover in these stories.”—Ron Graham, professor of mathematics, computer science and engineering, University of California, San Diego
“Brian Hayes’s book is a refreshing collection of superb mathematical essays. Ranging from choosing up sides to choosing names, the topics are intriguingly nonstandard. Moreover, the writing is clean, the explanations are pellucid, and the effect on the reader is exhilarating. First-rate all the way through.”—John Allen Paulos, author of Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences and Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up
"Every essay in this book is a gem of science writing on its highest level—accurate, up to date, brimming with surprising information, deep insights, and a profound love of mathematics. Its scope is awesome. Topics include a fantastic clock in Strasbourg, randomness, poverty, war, geology, genetics, gear ratios, partitions, nomenclature, group theory, and the ambiguity of the equals sign. There isn't a dull page in the book."—Martin Gardner, author of The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems
"While driving across my home state of Michigan not so long ago, I noticed that the format for the state's license plates changed. The old format had three letters followed by three digits; sometime recently, a fourth digit was added. Wondering why the change had been made, I figured that the old format had 26³ · 1000 possible designations and quickly estimated that this gave around 16 million possibilities. I knew that the population of Michigan is about 10 million so I could see, assuming license plates are not reused, how we could be running low on plates either now or in the near future. Maybe this was a good time to add another digit. Mathematicians do this kind of thinking frequently. There's no deep mathematics involved, but our comfort with computation can help explain observations we make as well as make a long drive a little less tedious. In his wonderful new book, Group Theory in the Bedroom, and Other Mathematical Diversions, Brian Hayes shows how pleasurable this king of thinking can be and the surprising places to which it can lead. The book collects and slightly reworks twelve of Hayes' essays, which originally appeared over the last decade in the The Sciences and American Scientist. Each essay also includes an 'Afterthoughts' section in which Hayes reflects on the original work, scrupulously own up to errors, and discusses responses received from readers . . ...
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
 Extremely Interesting Even for Math-a-phobics April 30, 2008
William Gronos (Oklahoma City, OK)
34 out of 35 found this review helpful
If you liked the book "Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything" (which I loved), there is a good chance you will like this one too. The author may have screwed-up giving it the title he did and by adding "and Other Mathematical Diversions", as it may put off or scare off a lot of people who would find it enjoyable. One would be hard pressed to find a mathematical equation anywhere in the book.
Take for instance the first chapter, "Clock of Ages", on the astronomical clock located in the Strasbourg Cathedral, in the city of Strasbourg, Alsace. Though the current version of the clock dates from 1843, not only was it designed to be Y2K compliant, it is also Y10K functional, designed to directly display the current year up to 9999 and the only revision needed to make it correct for subsequent years would be to paint the number "1" to the left of the display. It will continue to display such events as the correct date for Easter even in the year 19999 (Easter falls on April 3rd in 11842). Though solely a mechanical device, the gears of the clock were designed to be accurate to an error of less than one second per century. There is a gear in the clock that turns only once every 2,500 years and the celestial sphere out in front of the clock will complete one full precessional cycle after the passage of 25,806 years.
After his discussion of the beauty of the design of this clock, the author then takes up a philosophical discussion of time, asking if anyone will still care what date Easter will be in 11842, or even if we will still be counting in years of the Common Era.
The second chapter, "Follow the Money", demonstrates how through even an entirely random process, wealth tends to become concentrated in the hands of a few people, even in a fair system.
The remaining chapters are similarly varied and all are interesting.
A great book with a wide variety of interesting subjects and an engaging, erudite writing style.
Excellent Book on Perspective and Framing Problems August 16, 2008
K. Scott Proctor (Wilmington, DE USA)
16 out of 17 found this review helpful
This is an excellent collection of thought-provoking essays related to mathematics. Brian Hayes covers a wide array of topics through the lens of mathematics in an engaging, thought-provoking and entertaining manner.
The essays contained in this book, addressing topics such as the genetic code, the Continental Divide and randomness, among other topics, vary widely in subject matter, but share a common underlying theme. Specifically, each of these essays asks the reader to examine "things," such as the genetic code, from a unique perspective. Moreover, Hayes pulls the reader through a thoughtful and insightful problem framing approach that has broad applications across many disciplines.
I found the content and style across each essay to be first-rate. This book teaches the reader many things...most importantly, I feel it offers rare insight into the power of shifting perspective and framing problems.
Math Applied To Some Everyday Things October 21, 2008
Chuck Brooks (Fullerton, CA)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This delightful book takes a playful look at some interesting and unusual ways that math can be applied. Much more than puzzles, each of the 12 chapters examine a particular everyday object or action in ways that are easy to understand and give more depth to some of the discoveries made along the way. An easy and enjoyable read for the curious of all ages. Complemented by an extensive section for those who want to do a deeper dive on the magic and mystery of how math can explain how some everyday things work.
A little gem, shame about the title August 6, 2009
J. Lawry (New York, USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
As a mathematician I am frequently given popular books about mathematics as gifts, but most of these aren't interesting to me. Usually they cover topics that are already very familiar to me, and frequently they aim to "blind the reader with science" about topics in pure mathematics that are difficult to connect to the real world in a very convincing way. And frankly, as an applied mathematician, it's disappointing that so many mathematics popularizers fixate so much on prime numbers, Fermat's last theorem and other frippery.
This book has none of these flaws, and it is one I would have happily received as a gift. It's a fascinating collection of essays about applied and computational mathematics. Brian Hayes has chosen topics that haven't been beaten to death by other authors, and written thoughtful pieces about all of them. Stand-out chapters for me included the chapter on coming up with an algorithm for computing the location of the watershed in a terrain, and an essay tracing the succession of failed attempts to solve the genetic code. The watershed chapter is great, because the author describes how he tried to solve the problem over the course of a vacation without access to a library to see what the "right answer" is, and he records his missteps and failed attempts to come up with an algorithm. It's a great glimpse at how problem-solving works: so few mathematicians are prepared to let you in on the process including the failed attempts that allowed them to build their elegant structure, be it a proof, algorithm, or solution.
The level assumed of the reader is such that a college student or eager high school student would probably get a lot from the book. There are very few equations and no program code snippets, which is generally the right choice. The book is very well written: it doesn't shy from the technical details where relevant, but you never feel like you're reading a dry textbook.
All of the essays have appeared in magazines before this book came out. This means that the author has already received feedback from readers about each essay, and he includes a postscript after each chapter with interesting points that arose in correspondence from readers. This means that the essays have already been checked for glaring omissions and oversights, which is great, and the additional commentary adds a lot to each chapter.
But I don't like the book's title: it looks like a publisher's idea of something that will grab people's attention to make them pick the book up, but when I saw it at the bookstore I just thought "definitely trying too hard -- skip that one". (Similarly, I really wish science book publishers would stop including Einstein's name in the title of their books with the barest thread of justification: it's an excellent sign that the book is terrible.) The relevant chapter is about mattress-flipping, by the way.
But in spite of that, great book. When's Brian Hayes' next collection of essays coming out?
Mathematics with a dry wit... May 22, 2009
John P. Jones III (Albuquerque, NM, USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
A most informative book. Hayes is one of those unusual people who are constantly wondering why things work, and why things are the way they are. The book is composed of 12 different essays, which were originally published in "American Scientist" magazine, each with its own epilogue (afterthoughts), which is often the response he receives from readers, but also includes reflections on his own developments since the piece was first published. The essays are written for people with a scientific background, yet despite the profusion of equations on the top half of the cover, the reader is exposed to them in "bite size" pieces, and the author is adept at explaining the concepts in ordinary English. The range of topics is broad, thus there are likely to be two or three that push the "hot button" of the inquisitive mind.
He starts in Strasbourg, where there is a "clock of ages," in the cathedral, that is not only Y2K (remember that!) compliant, but Y10K compliant. Yes, a clock accurate for 10,000 years, including calculations for the date of Easter - and there is not a bit of electronics in the clock; it is all done with gears. His droll insights into the difficulties of predicting the future are aptly stated by: "For all I know, some future generation will thank us for burning up all that noxious petroleum and curse us for exterminating the smallpox virus." His next chapter is on the difficulties of obtaining truly random numbers. The third chapter attempts to examine the old axiom that "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" in analytically terms, and as he admits in the afterthoughts, it is actually the disparity between the rich and poor that seems to grow. I'll admit that the chapter on the genetic code was "beyond me," and I eventually lost interest, however the next chapter on the statistics of deadly quarrels (war) is most illuminating. Likewise, living near the Continental Divide, I found his chapter on the mathematical determination of same to be most informative. There was a chapter on determining the number of teeth in gears that did not particularly "click," but was redeemed by the next one entitled "The Easiest Hard Problem," which resonated with many a childhood: how do you fairly determine teams in "pick-up." "Naming Names" was also fascinating, examining the available names left under existing schematics for Internet country codes, chemical elements, stock ticker symbols, radio call signs and airport codes. Numbers that are defined by the base three sounds like a soporific topic but Hayes wit and insights revive it with such sub-headings as "Martha Stewart's File Cabinet." The penultimate chapter deals with the philosophical implications of the "equals" sign. The final chapter supplies the basis for the title; Hayes manages to maintain his books "G" rating though. The sexual allusion remains only that; the subject is the best mathematical way of flipping one's mattress, and I'd settle for the proposed mnemonic: "Spin in the spring, flip in the fall."
Overall, a wonderful, slightly eccentric book for the curious, and if one is looking for an off-beat topic for the next cocktail party chatter, you'd be able to find it here. Hayes' book is highly recommended.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 8
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