Beyond Numeracy

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful, fun-to-read educational book
Review: This book was required for my contemporay mathematics class in school, and I thought it was wonderful. Paulos explains many areas of mathematics so that anyone can understand. He does this using real-world examples. Paulos also explains how many common items in our lives are based on math. I think this is great for the student who finds himself/herself saying, "When am I ever going to use this in real life?" during their math classes.

Rating:
Summary: GREAT INTRO REFERENCE TO SIMPLE AND COMPLEX MATH
Review: This is almost a sequel to Innumeracy in which Paulos goes beyond the simple exposition of people's difficulties with math to teach, in a very readable fashion, to main concepts of mathematics, be it simple high school, college, or even the complex research mathematics.

The nice thing about this book is that you can read it bit by bit, since each chapter that deals with a topic is about 3-5 pages long, so you won't get bored and if you don't understand one topic you can move on to the next one. The topics are not really connected, so one can just move on to somehting one finds more interesting.

Overall, I believe I now know what many of the complex topics like chaos theory are about. Enough for a cocktail conversation with a mathematician at least.