Subtitled: The Unreal Reality of Mathematics
(Basic Books, 1995, x + 164pp, including 14pp of further reading and index)
One more in this series for now. Despite the title, this books’ topic is not that that of Martin Rees in JUST SIX NUMBERS. This is rather an introduction to various basic ideas of mathematics, and how math is about more than numbers.
Moreover, it builds to an introduction of the new concepts of math and physics that began to emerge in the 1980s and continued for a couple decades. Chaos, fractals, Fibonacci numbers, complexity, emergence, and so on. Stewart also co-wrote two larger books with Jack Cohen exploring these concepts in greater detail: THE COLLAPSE OF CHAOS in 1994, and FIGMENTS OF REALITY in 1997. Stewart and Cohen later teamed up with fantasy writer Terry Pratchett to write a series of four books called THE MAGIC OF DISCWORLD, contrasting how physics supposedly works in that universe with the new ideas about our own universe. I reviewed the first of them way back in 2015, here.
I have a bookshelf of a couple dozen titles on these various concepts, including James Gleick’s relatively well-known CHAOS (1987) and others by John L. Casti, Stuart A. Kauffman, Murray Gell-Mann, et al.
Key Ideas
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