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Rating: 
Summary: Seeing beauty through numbers
Review: For those of us who admire nature and see it as a product of processes both beautiful and rational, Adam's book is the perfect bedside long-termer for anyone more than casually interested in math or the intricate patterns in nature.This book is chock full of ponderous examples of mathematical simplicity and complexity in nature, and reading it I was constantly reading only one topic and then putting the book down for days to think about and tinker with the question myself. Good pictures, solid math (I prefer clean, modelistic equations to numerical approximations anyday), and a charming, conversational writing style make this book highly readable and highly inspiring in the way it makes you reexamine your perception of nature as unintegrated or inelegant. The very repetition of mathematical themes throughout nature - such as the omnipresent Golden Ration - proves otherwise. For me, this is staying on my "constantly referenced" shelf.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: I disagree strongly with the previous reviewer. The book is well presented, with some lovely photos, and is nicely produced and attractive. The actual content of the book is equally good. Some of the material is familiar, but the author always seems to take a good fresh look at these topics so I still enjoyed them. There was some new material too, which I particularly enjoyed. This is an excellent book, and I hope that the negative review on Amazon will not discourage potential readers from buying a copy.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: I disagree strongly with the previous reviewer. The book is well presented, with some lovely photos, and is nicely produced and attractive. The actual content of the book is equally good. Some of the material is familiar, but the author always seems to take a good fresh look at these topics so I still enjoyed them. There was some new material too, which I particularly enjoyed. This is an excellent book, and I hope that the negative review on Amazon will not discourage potential readers from buying a copy.
Rating: 
Summary: OK for math nerds but bad for cool engineers
Review: Like a fellow reviewer I read that biology would be discussed in the book, as far as I can tell after having nearly finished it there is almost none. As an engineer I had been exposed to much of the theory presented in the first few years of undergrad, the book must be intended for people with more of a math and less of a physics back ground.
Interesting observation: the author seems to think that any measurement with a protractor or angle derived from approximations is exact, yet measurements taken with a yard stick can only be accurate to a few feet and hardly worth doing math on.
Rating: 
Summary: two thumbs down
Review: The book rehashes familiar material involving estimation.
Unfortunately, no attempt is made to accompany this with
either error or sensitivity analysis. Thus the "conclusions"
drawn are so loose they may well not even be correct to a
single significant figure.
On top of this the steady stream of biblical quotes is
offputting and ungermane. Add to this a mind boggling
infelicity to begin chapter two and you have a real mess.
In terms of technique the author commits the beginner's mistake of using 'd' for a parameter inside calculus
problems thus making it impossible to distinguish between
multiplication and differentiation.
Readers interested in a far superior treatment may wish to
look at "The Parsimonious Universe" by Tromba & Hildebrandt.
Rating:
Summary: two thumbs down
Review: The book rehashes familiar material involving estimation.
Unfortunately, no attempt is made to accompany this with
either error or sensitivity analysis. Thus the "conclusions"
drawn are so loose they may well not even be correct to a
single significant figure.
On top of this the steady stream of biblical quotes is
offputting and ungermane. Add to this a mind boggling
infelicity to begin chapter two and you have a real mess.
In terms of technique the author commits the beginner's mistake of using 'd' for a parameter inside calculus
problems thus making it impossible to distinguish between
multiplication and differentiation.
Readers interested in a far superior treatment may wish to
look at "The Parsimonious Universe" by Tromba & Hildebrandt.
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