One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation.

Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. For Bemelmans was 'the man who came to cocktails'. He may not convert all readers to loving math, but he does provide a glimmer of understanding of how it works.Īn extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. Parker goes on to explain how smartphones digitally code a photo and why a text sent across the globe arrives error-free despite all the relays along the way. This includes the feat in which he and math colleagues set up a field of thousands of dominoes to demonstrate how a computer adds two binary numbers. But this one man is also a dedicated denizen of the digital universe, and some of the best parts of the book are Parker’s explanations of how computers work. Instead, he provides one man’s take on the history of math, emphasizing the puzzles that led to profound discoveries or to tantalizing conjectures that remain neither proved nor disproved. Also, by this point, it’s clear that the author does not aspire to create a math-for-dummies handbook. Some readers will lose their way-the visualizations alone are tough. This branch of math is topology, but in arriving there, Parker makes forays into subfields like tiling (think bathroom floors), packing (how to ship oranges efficiently) and knot theory. Parker explains how a square becomes a cube in 3-D and a hypercube (a tesseract) in four dimensions or a doughnut (a torus) becomes an object called a Klein bottle. But his approach has the acceleration of a Ferrari, so readers are quickly racing into higher dimensional space.

Parker begins with the easier elements like number systems, primes and the polygons of Euclidean geometry. Guardian and Telegraph writer and comedian Parker aims “to show people all the fun bits of mathematics.”įor starters, take out paper and pencil, compass, straight edge, maybe a balloon or a bag of oranges, because the author will challenge you to tackle puzzles, whether it’s cutting a pizza in equal slices so some pieces never touch the center or passing a quarter through a nickel-size hole.

Matt parker 4th dimension